After introducing you to the Firefox 3 tips and tricks more than 2 months back, here I present the latest hacks to make firefox much faster than ever before.
- Enable Pipelining – This is one of the most basic things to be done with all versions of firefox. Type about:config in the address bar, double-click network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining so their values are set to true, then double-click network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and set this to 8.
- Reduce content switch threshold – If you don’t move your mouse or touch the keyboard for 0.75 seconds (the content switch threshold), Firefox enters a low frequency interrupt mode, which means its interface becomes less responsive but your page loads more quickly. Reducing the content switch threshold can improve performance. Type about:config and press [Enter], right-click in the window and select New > Integer. Type content.switch.threshold, click OK, enter 250000 (a quarter of a second) and click OK to finish.
- Block Flash – Install the Flashblock extension (flashblock.mozdev.org) and it’ll block all Flash applets from loading, so web pages will display much more quickly. And if you discover some Flash content that isn’t entirely useless, just click its placeholder to download and view the applet as normal.
- Increase the cache size – As you browse the web so Firefox stores site images and scripts in a local memory cache, where they can be speedily retrieved if you revisit the same page. If you have plenty of RAM (2 GB of more), leave Firefox running all the time and regularly return to pages then you can improve performance by increasing this cache size. Type about:config and press [Enter], then right-click anywhere in the window and select New > Integer. Type browser.cache.memory.capacity, click OK, enter 65536 and click OK, then restart your browser to get the new, larger cache.
- Render quickly Large, complex web pages can take a while to download. Firefox doesn’t want to keep you waiting, so by default will display what it’s received so far every 0.12 seconds (the “content notify interval”). While this helps the browser feel snappy, frequent redraws increase the total page load time, so a longer content notify interval will improve performance. Type about:config and press [Enter], then right-click (Apple users ctrl-click) somewhere in the window and select New > Integer. Type content.notify.interval as your preference name, click OK, enter 500000 (that’s five hundred thousand, not fifty thousand) and click OK again. Right-click again in the window and select New > Boolean. This time create a value called content.notify.ontimer and set it to True to finish the job. Try these out and let me know your views on the same. Cheers!!
