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I’ve been searching for ways to make my computer faster, searching for faster chat clients, and faster browsers. Browser wise, I still like Firefox best even though it’s not so fast starting up and about average on page loads. I love the addons like fireFTP, Delicious, Web Developer, IE Tabs, and AdBlock Plus for instance. Yet all these addons do contribute to making Firefox start up slower. I just read an article recently on tweaks to make Firefox faster and I must say it really does work noticeably. So if you’re like me and you like Firefox for its customize-ability but not for it’s speed, trying this list of tweaks may help.

I’ll paraphrase the instructions here, but you’re welcome to view the original source mentioned above.

1. In Firefox, type about:config in the addressbar and hit enter.
2. Type network.http.pipelining in the filter bar. If it is set to false, double click it and will toggle to true.
3. Type network.http.proxy.pipelining in the filter bar. Double click to set to true.
4. Type network.http.pipelining.maxrequests in the filter bar. Double click and change the value from its default (usually 4) to 30. This makes Firefox make more requests to sites you visit
5. Copy nglayout.initialpaint.delay and right-click on an empty space in about:config. Select New -> Integer and paste that in there and hit enter. Set the value to 0 to speed up browser response.
6. Type browser.cache.disk.capacity in the filter bar. Double click and change the default 50000 to 15000 if you have between 512Mb and 1Gb of RAM.
7. If you want to release RAM when you minimize FF, go to about:config. Right-click an empty space, and create a new Boolean, call it config.trim_on_minimize, and set its value to TRUE.

Be sure to restart Firefox to experience the effects.

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2 Responses to “Faster Firefox”

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Brenda

August 17th, 2009 at 12:22 pm

Firefox is starting to slow down majorly for me recently. It starts out being okay (when I restart the browser), but as time passes, it starts to hang more and more. And when I peek at my Task Manager, it indicates that the most amount of CPU resources is used by … Firefox.

Despite all that … I still love Firefox. Haha. Way too much, I think. Having to restart my browser every now and then to release virtual memory is still MUCH BETTER than having to tolerate Internet Explorer.

And I’d have to try all your tips to see whether it solves my problem!

Jen

August 22nd, 2009 at 11:22 pm

I try to keep my add-ons for Firefox to a minimum, and disable add-ons like FireFTP, and GreaseMonkey, and those involved with making websites when I’m not using them. I think it keeps it fast.

But I tried those tips anyway! Will see if it goes any faster!

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