Do you Need to Tweak Firefox for Speed?

Chris Pirillo — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 05:37:23 +0000

Add to iTunes | Add to YouTube | Add to Google | RSS Feed

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.

Want to embed this video on your own site, blog, or forum? Use this code or download the video:

Do you Need to Tweak Firefox for Speed?

Chris Pirillo » config

Do you Need to Tweak Firefox for Speed?