KevinPittman.com

After completely ruining my Firefox installation while trying to apply a custom skin I was searching for an extension called Clone Window. I just happened to stumble upon this site which has some tips on how to make Firefox startup and load pages faster.

I’ve made his recommended changes and Firefox seems to startup a bit faster, page load time feels snappier as well occasionally. It could all be placebo, but it’s worth a try if you have a few extra minutes.

To Speed up start time:
Simply right-click on the Firefox icon you use to start the browser. Add the text /Prefetch:1 to the end of the line in the target field. The whole line should look something like the following:

“C:Program FilesMozilla Firefoxfirefox.exe” /Prefetch:1

To speed up page load time:
You get to the main configuration screen by putting about:config in the URL address input box
Setting the following preferences will dramatically speed up page load time even on slow connections:

network.ftp.idleConnectionTimeout = 60
network.http.connect.timeout = 30
network.http.keep-alive.timeout = 30
network.http.max-connections = 32
network.http.max-connections-per-server = 8
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy = 8
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server = 4
network.http.pipelining = true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests = 8
network.http.proxy.pipelining = true
network.http.request.max-start-delay = 5
plugin.expose_full_path = true
browser.xul.error_pages.enabled = true

There is a thread on Mozillazine about fine tuning Firefox.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 3rd, 2004 at 6:43 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.