Firefox Performance Tweaks

**DeusInnomen** · 01-26-09, 08:05 AM

Found this over at the Boy Genius Report, great tips.

Originally Posted by http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2009/01/25/a-handful-of-firefox-tweaks-that-will-double-your-browser-speed/

Reduce the amount of RAM Firefox uses for its cache feature

1. Type “about:config” (no quotes) in the adress bar in the browser.
2. Find “browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer”
3. Set it’s value to “0“;(Zero)

Increase the Speed at Which Firefox loads pages

1. Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit Enter.
(Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.)

2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 10.

This means it will make 10 requests at once.

3. Lastly, right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0“;.(Zero)

This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. If you’re using a broadband connection you’ll load pages faster now.
Optionally (for even faster web browsing) here are some more options for your about:config (you might have to create some of these entries by Right Click –> New– > Interger or String

network.dns.disableIPv6: set “false”
“content.notify.backoffcount”: set “5“; (Five)
“plugin.expose_full_path”: set “true”.
“ui.submenuDelay”: set “0; (zero)

Reduce RAM usage to 10MB when Firefox is minimized:

This little hack will drop Firefox’s RAM usage down to 10 Mb when minimized:

1. Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.
2. Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
3. In the box that pops up enter “config.trim_on_minimize”. Press Enter.
4. Now select True and then press Enter.
5. Restart Firefox.

**DJ Ms. White** · 01-26-09, 08:15 AM

muchas gracias

**Kanati** · 01-26-09, 11:56 AM

Looks good. I think I've seen some of these before but didn't remember them until you posted.

I will say that I haven't had any luck with the 10mb when minimized thing though. Unfortunately. That would have been worth the cost of admission right there. My firefox was using almost 500 meg of ram when I started tweaking.

**WileECyte** · 01-26-09, 12:00 PM

I haven't found Firefox 3 to be near the memory hog that Firefox 2 was.

Watch that TCP pipelining, that really can throttle a website if it's being run on an already overloaded server. I've seen websites start block people for using features like that.

**Bunni** · 01-26-09, 01:38 PM

delicious, i have the faster fox (tweak network settings) addon, just puts all those vars into a nice gui. :10

**cop1991** · 01-26-09, 01:49 PM

Mmmmmmm faster loading..... Thanks for the article.

**Blah64** · 02-25-10, 12:19 PM

I just found out about the add-on 'AFOM' and it has really helped with my firefox bloating. It was getting kinda annoying how my firefox would eventually rack up >1GB in RAM usage, become really slow and crash. With AFOM, the memory usage hasn't reached anywhere near that high yet.

**Consultant** · 02-25-10, 12:32 PM

So far, so good. TTP is loading about 50% faster than I was 5 minutes ago I would say. I can especially tell with the "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" change.

**...bigdog...** · 02-25-10, 02:26 PM

Originally Posted by Consultant

So far, so good. TTP is loading about 50% faster than I was 5 minutes ago I would say. I can especially tell with the "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" change.

me too.

next.....where the hell is threading? How long have multicore processors been out, and why the hell is firefox dragging it's feet?

ridiculous.

**JBMCW2010** · 02-25-10, 02:32 PM

threading brings up all sorts of new problems like what to thread, is it truly able to thread this part off, can the threads communicate with eachother etc.