Do you Need to Tweak Firefox for Speed?
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Firefox 3 download day has come and gone. It broke records… and servers. It took a little getting used to when I downloaded it. There were things I loved, and things I hated about it. I didn’t really like the Awesome bar. The good news is that I received a few recommendations for things to do to improve my FF 3 experience. According to Buruc, all I have to do is:
I found a more convenient way to get rid of the “awesome bar”. Go to the Mozilla add-ons website, and get the ” Old bar 1.2 ” add-on. Install it, restart Firefox, and that should do it. This way you could turn the feature on and off as you please.
You know what I’m talking about with Firefox 3 and that “awesome” bar. When you type in an address, and you suddenly have this long list of URLs under the address bar. To me, that seems too clunky. I just don’t like it.
Maverick also emailed me with some other recommendations. Go to the address bar, and type in about:config. When you look at this page, you’ll be overwhelmed, I guarantee. Pretty much everything you can configure in Firefox can be controlled via this page. Don’t touch anything before you backup, and don’t touch anything until someone has given you a good recommendation that has been tested. Before you dive into doing this, you might want to read through PC Tips Box. Here are the values that Maverick suggests you change, in order to speed up Firefox. If these particular values don’t exists, you can add them yourself by right-clicking anywhere in the config page and choosing “new”.
- Find network.http.pipelining. Set this value to True.
- Next, go to network.http.pipelining.firstrequest and set that to True, as well.
- Go to network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and change that to 8.
- Now we’ll get to network.http.proxy.pipelining and again set it to True.
- Find nglayout.initialpaint.delay and change it to a 0.
- Go to content.notify.interval and set this to 0.
- Locate content.switch.threshold and change this to True.
- And finally, change content.interrupt.parsing to True as well.
If you know of any other good tips for tweaking browsers of any kind to make them work better, be sure to email them to me. Make sure they’re ones that have been tried and tested. I won’t pass along anything that could hurt anyone’s experience.
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18 Comments
usrbingeek’s musings
July 8th, 2008
at 11:18pm
Chris Pirillo Are You Organized? Need Poker Freeware for the Mac? Playing with a Headplay Video Visor (Coupon!) World’s Slimmest WebcamDo you Need to Tweak Firefox for Speed?
AshTR
July 8th, 2008
at 12:38am
Cool. I’ve already got this all setup but it’ll be good for others that want to speed up Firefox on their broadband connection.
Raymond Combs
July 8th, 2008
at 10:39am
# 7 says to change content.switch.threshold to “True”. This value is an integer. Only Boolean can be changed to true/false.
Stan
July 8th, 2008
at 10:55am
Hello Chris
Thank you for the tweaks. I had tried other tweaks but this is much more expansive and logical. One problem though and I wanted to be sure I am right. I am legally blind and miss things but this is pretty much apparent when you go to set “content.switch.threshold and change this to True”
THis is not a true, false setting but numerical. Am I right in thinking this is to be set to “0″? or is it just an error and should be left alone.
Thank you for your incredible newsletters. I have subscribed to them for many years now and stiil can’t wait to see the latest ideas, and critiques on the subjects you wish to pass on to us.
Hope you can clear this up and thanks again,
Stan
Robert Engelbardt
July 8th, 2008
at 5:12pm
“Locate ‘content.switch.threshold’ and change this to True.” appears to be incorrect as this setting is looking for an integer and not a boolean “true” or “false”.
“content.interrupt.parsing”, when set to true, is necessary for this setting to to be active in any case.
In the process of attempting to change the setting, I lost it completely and don’t know how to get it back without reloading Firefox. I set the “—–.parsing” to “false” so that it won’t make any difference anyway but I would like to know how to get the original “—-.threshold” setting back. I can’t seem to find any way to modify “about:config”.
Ken
July 8th, 2008
at 5:13pm
I don’t see why people brought about this much hype about FireFox 3. I’ve used Safari for Windows for almost a year and am perfectly fine with it. I previously used FireFox 2, but did not like the interface, and after that I read TONS of information about Apple, and decided to try their browser, Safari. I thought it wouldn’t work because I did not own a Mac, but I’m using it right now and it is faster than any browser I’ve ever used. I also like it because the fonts are darker than in other browsers. And the interface is cleaner and simpler than IE7 or FF2. I thought about downloading FF3, but I’m perfectly fine with Safari for Windows and will use Safari 4 when it is released.
Spiffy
July 8th, 2008
at 5:39pm
content.switch.threshold is an integer value in my Firefox, I can’t change it to “true”. Does the integer value need to be changed?
Mesiox
July 8th, 2008
at 5:51pm
I have seen a few of these tweaks around, however not all, i tryed them and i do feel a vast improvement, thanks chris, and Maverick for the tips! :)
Alex Liao
July 8th, 2008
at 9:32pm
I think we should always tweak for SPEEEEED!!!!
Pat Hawks
July 8th, 2008
at 9:59pm
Video comment on Seesmic – http://www.seesmic.com/video/vEGsE4bt4c
If these tweaks are so great, why weren’t they all turned on by default?
Robert Engelbardt
July 9th, 2008
at 1:48pm
My previous comments are still valid but I was able to recover “content.internet.parsing” by simply reinstalling the application. This setting came back with the 750,000 default and other other changes I made were still present. If you decide to publish my original comment, please remove the last paragraph relating to losing the setting as it doesn’t directly relate to to the error I’m describing..
Matt Brown
July 11th, 2008
at 6:31pm
I am starting to use FF3 more than safari due to plug-ins even though safari is a tad faster :P
Windows_Vista-
July 11th, 2008
at 7:36pm
Thanks for the tweeks they really helped me fire fox is my defult browser so thanks again
Kunwar Kochar
July 12th, 2008
at 9:10am
“content.switch.threshold” should not be a boolean but instead an integer…
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Content.switch.threshold
But nonetheless.. thankx a lot chris! =)
Sean Ames
July 16th, 2008
at 2:44pm
Wonderful tweaks- thanks a lot Chris and whoever sent this in. Also, the link provided for PCTipsBox is great too. As for the sci-fi references…well, let’s just say this video was a wonderful way to get back to chris.pirillo.com-
Day the Earth Stood Still (Gort!)
I, Robot (First bullet)
Battlestar Galactica (And they ahve a plan)
Cheers folks- and happy browsing!
subsmash
July 18th, 2008
at 8:31am
Thanks for the tweaks Chris they really helped out.
FireFox FTW!
Jani
July 19th, 2008
at 9:52am
“Klaatu barada nikto!” is a reference from Sam Raimi/Bruce Campbell movie Army of Darkness aka Evil Dead 3.
joelg88
August 14th, 2008
at 9:06pm
I was on the youtube channel just browsing through some vids and saw this vid and just had to try this out. I am currently using Safari as my main browser on Windows Vista but that might change. I’ve been using FireFox 3 as my secondary browser. now that i’ve made those changes that pctipsbox.com recommended Firefox 3 is super fast. Faster than Safari. I’ll not start using Firefox more. Lets see what the Safari 4 beta’s bring. but firefox is now much faster.