Speed Up Firefox

12) Speed up Firefox. If you have a broadband
connection (and most of us do), you can use pipelining to speed up your
page loads. This allows Firefox to load multiple things on a page at
once, instead of one at a time (by default, it’s optimized for dialup
connections). Here’s how:

• Type about:config into the address bar and hit return. Type
  network.http in the filter field, and change the following settings
  (double-click on them to change them):
• Set network.http.pipelining to true
• Set network.http.proxy.pipelining to true
• Set network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to a number like 30. This will allow it to make 30 requests at once.
• network.dns.disableIPv6 to “true”
• Also, right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it
  nglayout.initialpaint.delay and set its value to 0. This value is
  the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it
  receives.

13) Limit RAM usage. If Firefox takes up too much
memory on your computer, you can limit the amount of RAM it is allowed
to us. Again, go to about:config, filterbrowser.cache and select
browser.cache.disk.capacity. It’s set to 50000, but you can lower it,
depending on how much memory you have. Try 15000 if you have between
512MB and 1GB ram.

14) Reduce RAM usage further for when Firefox is minimized.
This setting will move Firefox to your hard drive when you minimize it,
taking up much less memory. And there is no noticeable difference in
speed when you restore Firefox, so it’s definitely worth a go. Again,
go to about:config, right-click anywhere and select New-> Boolean.
Name it config.trim_on_minimize and set it to TRUE. You have to
restart Firefox for these settings to take effect.

15) Move or remove the close tab button. Do you
accidentally click on the close button of Firefox’s tabs? You can move
them or remove them, again through about:config. Edit the preference
for “browser.tabs.closeButtons”. Here are the meanings of each value:

• 0: Display a close button on the active tab only
• 1:(Default) Display close buttons on all tabs
• 2:Don’t display any close buttons
• 3:Display a single close button at the end of the tab bar (Firefox 1.x behavior)

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