Jimmy's weblog

With the final release of Firefox 1.0, it’s time to talk about some of the options available for increasing web browsing performance. Firefox makes a number of configuration options available via menus but the majority are hidden away from immediate view. Typing “about:config” in to the address bar will list them all and allow you to edit them.

The following settings are recommended for fast computer with fast connections. I’ve been using them for two weeks and have noticed a significant rendering speed increase.

If a preference listed already exists in your configuration setting you can edit it with a double click. If not, a right click will bring up the option to create a new preference.

user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.pipelining.maxrequests", 8);
user_pref("content.notify.backoffcount", 5);
user_pref("plugin.expose_full_path", true);
user_pref("ui.submenuDelay", 0);
user_pref("content.interrupt.parsing", true);
user_pref("content.max.tokenizing.time", 2250000);
user_pref("content.notify.interval", 750000);
user_pref("content.notify.ontimer", true);
user_pref("content.switch.threshold", 750000);
user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 0);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections", 48);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections-per-server", 16);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy", 16);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server", 8);
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.capacity", 65536); 

The network preferences tell Firefox to open and keep open more network connections allowing data to be requested more quickly. The other options largely relate to how quickly Firefox will start drawing pages on the screen.