How To: Firefox 2.0 Turbo Browsing Experience

I’ve been using [tag]Opera[/tag] lately and noticed that for certain sites (like deviantArt, PhotoMalaysia and Maybank2U), it can load the page almost rapidly, while [tag]Firefox[/tag] 2.0 takes a while to load it. I’m left with some pondering on why such phenomenon happens. It is no doubt that Opera have one of the fastest rendering engine for websites.

Then it occurred to me – Firefox [tag]pipelining[/tag] [tag]tweak[/tag]! Last time I didn’t bother to tweak my Firefox to cater for pipelining because I was using a GPRS [tag]connection[/tag], with a limited [tag]bandwidth[/tag]. Now that I have a very nice house mate who let me use his Streamyx (this is a 512kB/sec [tag]DSL[/tag] service) for no charge, I’ve decided to try this one small trick.

To begin, create a new tab in Firefox, and type the following in the address bar: “[tag]about[/tag]:[tag]config[/tag]“.

You will then see a long list of configuration items for Firefox, most of these are very crucial to the browser’s stability, so try not to mess around with them if you have no idea what they are for. Now key it “pipe” at the “Filter:” section on top, you’ll see three items listed:

network.http.pipelining (false)
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests (4)
network.http.proxy.pipelining (false)

What you have to do is to make each of these like the following

network.http.pipelining (true)
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests (8)
network.http.proxy.pipelining (true)

Close and restart Firefox. Now try to surf around and you will notice that on sites with a lot of images/items, it will load much more rapidly. This trick probably already being discussed since Firefox 1.x but often people forget about it, so here it is as a recall :)