8 hacks to make Firefox ridiculously fast

[waveomatic]

In Depth: 8 hacks to make Firefox ridiculously fast

Firefox has been outperforming IE in every department for years, and version 3 is speedier than ever.
But tweak the right settings and you could make it faster still, more than doubling your speed in some situations, all for about five minutes work and for the cost of precisely nothing at all. Here's what you need to do.


1. Enable pipelining
Browsers are normally very polite, sending a request to a server then waiting for a response before continuing. Pipelining is a more aggressive technique that lets them send multiple requests before any responses are received, often reducing page download times. To enable it, type about:config in the address bar, double-click network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining so their values are set to true, then double-click network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and set this to 8.
Keep in mind that some servers don't support pipelining, though, and if you regularly visit a lot of these then the tweak can actually reduce performance. Set network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining to false again if you have any problems.


2. Render quickly
Large, complex web pages can take a while to download. Firefox doesn't want to keep you waiting, so by default will display what it's received so far every 0.12 seconds (the "content notify interval"). While this helps the browser feel snappy, frequent redraws increase the total page load time, so a longer content notify interval will improve performance.
Type about:config and press [Enter], then right-click (Apple users ctrl-click) somewhere in the window and select New > Integer. Type content.notify.interval as your preference name, click OK, enter 500000 (that's five hundred thousand, not fifty thousand) and click OK again.
Right-click again in the window and select New > Boolean. This time create a value called content.notify.ontimer and set it to True to finish the job.


3. Faster loading
If you haven't moved your mouse or touched the keyboard for 0.75 seconds (the content switch threshold) then Firefox enters a low frequency interrupt mode, which means its interface becomes less responsive but your page loads more quickly. Reducing the content switch threshold can improve performance, then, and it only takes a moment.
Type about:config and press [Enter], right-click in the window and select New > Integer. Type content.switch.threshold, click OK, enter 250000 (a quarter of a second) and click OK to finish.


4. No interruptions
You can take the last step even further by telling Firefox to ignore user interface events altogether until the current page has been downloaded. This is a little drastic as Firefox could remain unresponsive for quite some time, but try this and see how it works for you.
Type about:config, press [Enter], right-click in the window and select New > Boolean. Type content.interrupt.parsing, click OK, set the value to False and click OK.


5. Block Flash
Intrusive Flash animations are everywhere, popping up over the content you actually want to read and slowing down your browsing. Fortunately there's a very easy solution. Install the Flashblock extension (flashblock.mozdev.org) and it'll block all Flash applets from loading, so web pages will display much more quickly. And if you discover some Flash content that isn't entirely useless, just click its placeholder to download and view the applet as normal.


6. Increase the cache size
As you browse the web so Firefox stores site images and scripts in a local memory cache, where they can be speedily retrieved if you revisit the same page. If you have plenty of RAM (2 GB of more), leave Firefox running all the time and regularly return to pages then you can improve performance by increasing this cache size. Type about:config and press [Enter], then right-click anywhere in the window and select New > Integer. Type browser.cache.memory.capacity, click OK, enter 65536 and click OK, then restart your browser to get the new, larger cache.


7. Enable TraceMonkey
TraceMonkey is a new Firefox feature that converts slow Javascript into super-speedy x86 code, and so lets it run some functions anything up to 20 times faster than the current version. It's still buggy so isn't available in the regular Firefox download yet, but if you're willing to risk the odd crash or two then there's an easy way to try it out.
Install the latest nightly build (ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/), launch it, type about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Type JIT in the filter box, then double-click javascript.options.jit.chrome and javascript.options.jit.content to change their values to true, and that's it - you're running the fastest Firefox Javascript engine ever.


8. Compress data
If you've a slow internet connection then it may feel like you'll never get Firefox to perform properly, but that's not necessarily true. Install toonel.net (toonel.net) and this clever Java applet will re-route your web traffic through its own server, compressing it at the same time, so there's much less to download. And it can even compress JPEGs by allowing you to reduce their quality. This all helps to cut your data transfer, useful if you're on a limited 1 GB-per-month account, and can at best double your browsing performance.

[vbo]

Hey waveo, have you tried this stuff yet? Any improvements in speed?

[waveomatic]

Yeah, this loads pages up much faster than normal for me.

[vbo]

Yeah, it's loading up fast in a lot of sites for me too even though I didn't use two of them (cache size and flashblock).

[TETRIS]

Whats the pros and cons of these hacks?

[waveomatic]

so far no con, I did everything but block the flash content and so far so good, load times are faster no doubt.

[vbo]

Yeah, I haven't seen anything different except for the speed. No errors or anything so far.

[Chippa]

Cons typically come from the maxrequests on the pipelining. Essentially what happens with the default browser is this:


you ---------> server


you make one single request to the server(actually i think FF defaults to 4). Depending on load, time of day, connection etc etc, the server will respond to the browser with the page requested. When you change the maxrequests, you go from the diagram above, to this:

---------->
---------->
---------->
you----------> server
---------->
---------->
---------->
---------->


You send all the requests at once request... Basically, its like a lottery...the more entries you have, the better chances you have at winning. The problem lies in when you have too many max requests going out. A properly configured server will see this as a DoS(denial of service) attack bc all of these requests are coming from one IP. The server will blacklist the IP, typically for 15 minutes, b4 allowing connectivity to it.

The way that waveo has this set up with 8 maxrequests is fine. I have mine set up to 30...most servers look at problems at 100....id actually recommend bumping the number up to 30 if you havent already.

another thing to add speed is to not delay on information recieved:

Right click, Select "new interger"....the name should be

nglayout.initialpaint.delay

with the value set to 0. This will instantly act on info recieved from the server


Hope this helps in the understanding. Payce



Oh and PS - If there is anyone running 256k or lower, dont do this....youll kill your connection

[waveomatic]

Thanks for that Chippa, I'm gonna bump up the maxrequests to 30 and make the entry for nglayout.initialpaint.delay.

[lanier2]

Hey I gotta question Wave-O! Does the amount of RAM you have still play an important part in how fast your page loads up? I followed steps 1 and 3, and the results are off the meat rack! Im just wonderin what could be possible if I had 2GBs of RAM or more....

[waveomatic]

More RAM is always better, not just for browsing but for anything your doing.

Look at it like this, your RAM is like your work table. How much RAM you have is how big of a table space you have, meaning you can put a lot more things on the table resulting in getting more work done. When you close one of the things you are working on, then it leaves the table(RAM) and goes in the drawer(your Hard Drive). Also, the more RAM you have means you spend much less time going in and out of your drawers.

There are much more factors, like the speed of the RAM and what not, but that gives an idea how RAM works. Lets say you have opened 5 windows and have a couple of programs running, the more RAM you have, everything will be seem faster because your not swapping back and forth from the Hard Drive. When RAM fills up, what start to happen is things get really slow because much time is spent going from table to drawer, back to table, back to drawer, etc.

[vbo]

I once had 2 gigs of ram. It was the smoothest thing I ever had. This PC I'm using right now is my sister's which has 512 MBs. Lol. She thinks a computer runs on the amount of space on the hard drive. So she's wondering why the computer is so slow if you live it on for over a day.

2 gigs pretty much means you can leave it on as long as you want.

[lanier2]

OK, this is very weird yall. Check this out, I looked for the most strenuous speed test that would really put my connection to work and found this one http://performance.toast.net/
I followed step 1.Enable pipelining and took a chance and bumped my setting up to 100. Then I did the test Blue Angels test which is a very large high quality picture. I tried first with the new settings in Mozilla FireFox and scored only 1308KB against Comcast's 2804KB,Bell's 2989KB, and Rogers 4943. Then, I did the same test using IE and outscored Firefox with 4597KB! Im sittin there like no fuckin way! what do you guys think could be happening here? I doubt if I go back down to 30 or 8 it will change anything.

[Chippa]

Originally Posted by lanier2

OK, this is very weird yall. Check this out, I looked for the most strenuous speed test that would really put my connection to work and found this one http://performance.toast.net/
I followed step 1.Enable pipelining and took a chance and bumped my setting up to 100. Then I did the test Blue Angels test which is a very large high quality picture. I tried first with the new settings in Mozilla FireFox and scored only 1308KB against Comcast's 2804KB,Bell's 2989KB, and Rogers 4943. Then, I did the same test using IE and outscored Firefox with 4597KB! Im sittin there like no fuckin way! what do you guys think could be happening here? I doubt if I go back down to 30 or 8 it will change anything.

First off, let me state that what waveo said about RAM is correct, BUT it will NOT help your pages load faster. Page speed all depends on the speed of network that you have(save for flash pages, and any other addition that requires cpu usage). The higher your download rate, the faster your speed.

Secondly, with IE, you have to remember a few things. One, with that test, you are essentially testing the immediate instance. Meaning, that you could have been connections at any given time to that page. Secondly, IE is a Windows component. All the .dll files and any other executables are seamlessly integrated within the browser and OS.

But the whole speedtest is a case by case basis. It depends on your browser version, plugins, OS, cpu, network speed, etc etc.

And just for fun, i did the test at work. My results show FF is about 1/3 faster than IE.

[Volumyn]

Thank you Waveo and chippa! The new Minefield browser combined with the hacks is amazing!