Firefox Tweak - Speed it Up

We all know that Firefox is a great browser which beats its only competitor, Microsoft Internet Explorer, in many ways. Its primary features are bullet proof security, extensibility, and usability in general since it complies 100% with W3C standard - all of which seems to be seriously missing from its rival.

But lately I've been having difficulty using Firefox. The main reason being the browser taking unreasonably longer time to load even the simplest site - like vanilla Google.com (not even iGoogle). I guess most of you are facing the similar problem in the newer releases of Firefox (esp above v1.5). In case you are experiencing this I'd like to assure you that you're not alone. At first glance the problem seemed like it has to do either with the network outage, memory overload, or one of the gazillion unknown potential reasons that could be causing the faithful Firefox to become slow and pathetic. But luckily, after bit of an analysis, it is evident that it has got nothing to do with any of the above mentioned causes. And the good news is that it could easily be fixed by tweaking the configuration of the browser and overriding its one of the not so useful built-in restriction.

Note that the effect of the following method could only be witnessed by the users having broadband connection.

STEPS:
1) On your browser address bar type about:config which will take you to the configuration page of the browser displaying various parameter that browser loads during application startup.
2) There you have to find three different entries and change each of their values as indicated.

Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true" by double clicking it
Set ""network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true" by double clicking it
Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 25 by double clicking the entry and entering number in the inputbox. This means it will make 25 requests at once. (This doesn't work in dial-up since such network has the limitation of handling only one request at a given time)

3) Create a new entry named ""nglayout.initialpaint.delay" by Rt. clicking anywhere on the body of browser and selecting New > Integer from the pop-up menu. Then set its value to "0". This is the amount of time browser waits before taking any action on received information.

4) Close the browser and restart it in order for the changes to take effect.

That's about it. Now your browser should be loading pages at a faster pace than before.

Happy Surfing!!!

Note: To those using IE, its highly recommended that you switch to Firefox. You can download this free application by following the link provided in the right column of this site in the section "Download Cool Tools"