How To Speed Up Firefox (Helpful Vanity)

[KoRn]

Here's something for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up:

1.Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.

If you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages MUCH faster now!

[KoRn]

Not sure exactly what you are referring to. The obvious manages to escape me at times, more details please. :)

[JerseyHighlander]

ping for later

[KoRn]

I've never done any of that with a browser. I've always just copy/paste the link into a message body of an email if I want to have someone see a page.

[CyberCowboy777]

Wow!

First - I use ISDN BRI, I am fully aware of its limitations and have never called it Broadband.

Second - I am not sure why you would use the FCC as your definition of Broadband. You do realize that the Government is not the most reliable source of scientific information?

Third - this is the definition the FCC has on its web-site:

"Broadband refers most commonly to a new generation of high-speed transmission services, which allows users to access the Internet and Internet-related services at significantly higher speeds than traditional modems. It has the potential technical capability to meet consumers’ broad communication, entertainment, information, and commercial needs and desires.

Are There Different Types of Broadband?
There are several types of broadband services:

*

Digital Subscriber Line (DSL)
*

Cable Modem
*

Wireless Internet
*

Satellite "

Fourth - I have and used a MLPPP router for a year (WebRamp dual modem router, not the software version). It utilizes two bonded Analog data channels. I guess it could carry multiple data channels simultaneously, if you mean TWO data channels on two separate analog connections. But then that does not meet the definition I gave of Broadband anyway.

There are varying definitions depending what uninformed person your talking too. But I gave the industry standard answer (the one a student must give to pass any exam).

[CyberCowboy777]

What is you population density and terrain?

[is_is]

add me to your firefox ping list also, please

[BigSkyFreeper]

Population density is roughly one person per 7 square miles.

[KoRn]

Sounds like a good place to live.

[dbwz]

Bookmarking for reference, just in case my Firefox goes BOOM after I try this.

;-)

[KoRn]

Just carefully follow the instructions, and you'll be fine. ;-)

[Marie Antoinette]

Useful Info Ping

[dbwz]

Well, I did follow carefully, and so far so good. Thanks!

[CyberCowboy777]

Not much money in a WISP then! LOL!

And I thought I was in the boonies 40 minutes out of town!

We can do a 30mi backhual with flat terrain or peak to peak, but you need some consumer base for a ROI on the install.

The feds have been handing out grants to companies to bring better communications to rural communities, but i don't know the minimum population densities or what work in Big Sky country.

http://www.rurdev.usda.gov/rd/newsroom/2003/BBGrantApplicants2003.html

[DaGman]

Many, many thanks! The difference is incredible! I thought my neighborhood was filling up with more cable modem users thereby slowing down the overall speed. The problem was FF. I think its actually faster than IE (Internet Exploder) now.

[DaGman]

One question... has a fix come out for the slowness of Firefox and Mozilla when you restore them from being minimized?

[general_re]

Not to rain on anyone's parade, but noticing massive improvements in browsing by enabling pipelining is probably mostly psychological. Pipelining has to be supported on the server side, and there are a great many servers out there that still haven't enabled pipelining. Even if that's in place, the only people likely to experience significant increases in performance are folks on high bandwidth, high latency connections, because all pipelining does is allow multiple requests to be in flight at once - on a low latency connection, the response time will be such that pipelining will make very little difference at all to the bottom line. Try it and see - get a stopwatch and time page loads with and without pipelining enabled, but make sure you clear the cache between runs ;)

[general_re]

Err, lemme finish that thought. Anyway, time it on some common pages and see if it makes a difference - there are plenty of perverse cases where pipelining can make the browser slower, so it's not really as simple as "pipelining - yes" for most people. If it was that simple, why wouldn't it be enabled by default?

[wita]

I install Starband and Direcway, as well as a few others. They are not the end all and be all either. Although for folks in the boondocks, it may be the only other alternative. I think I would wait till the ka band satellite for Wildblue comes on line in early 2005 and then you will have three or four choices of satellite platform. For now, Cable modem appears to have the edge on speed over all possible choices other than T1 line, and now there is one faster than that. I travel enough and need my connection with me, that dial up is my only alternative for now.

[KoRn]

" the only people likely to experience significant increases in performance are folks on high bandwidth"

Umm, Did you miss the part where it said this was for Broadband users only?

[general_re]

Right. Did you miss the part where I said "high latency"? ;)

Satellite broadband users will likely see a big improvement - for the rest of us, not so much.

[KoRn]

I'm using T1 speed DSL at home, and I noticed a HUGE difference on websites that are heavy with lots of graphics and frames.

Before the changes, one site I visit frequently always loaded very slow. After the changes it loads almost instantly.

[ShadowAce]

Done. Welcome aboard.

[general_re]

I'll check in after lunch and give you a case where it fails pretty dramatically ;)

[KoRn]

If you would, when you post your findings please include specific info. The site, your connection speed, general system specs of your machine, and the type of network you are on. Are you using Firefox?

I have yet to see negatives with these changes personally, or from the feedback so far in this thread. I'm very interested in, and not predispositioned to dispute your claims.

[general_re]

Sure - I timed it myself last night after hunting around to find a page that would break the pipelining. 1.5 mbit DSL line, 2.8 GHz P4 with 768 MB memory running Windows 2000 SP4.

Keep in mind, I'm not saying there's no improvement ever, only that there are some cases when it doesn't improve things, some cases where it can make things slower, and that for most cases where it does improve things, the improvement is likely to not be earth-shattering for most people. On balance, it's probably worth enabling for most people, but it's the kind of thing that's worth a bit of testing to see if it helps in some particular case.

[general_re]

Okay, here's how we can test it. Presumably, you've already got pipelining enabled, so grab your stopwatch and get ready. The page I used is Google's translation page - it's nice, because it's got lots of little flag gifs, and even on a fast connection it'll take a bit to load, plus it's not some totally obscure page that nobody ever sees. First, let's clear your browser cache by going to "Tools" -> "Options" -> "Privacy" and hitting "Clear" next to "Cache". Once you've done that, start timing with your watch as soon as you click on the link, and as soon as the status bar at the bottom of the browser says "Done", stop the watch.

http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en

Got it? Now, disable http pipelining and http proxy pipelining in about:config - return to the default settings, basically. Clear your cache again and close and restart your browser. Come back to this page here on FR, grab your stopwatch, and time the page load again. You should notice a fairly significant difference in load times, although which one is faster may surprise you ;)

[Uncle Hal]

Same here but I cannot get my center button to work. Does yours?

[BigSkyFreeper]

My center button works fine. If I click a link with the center button it opens that link in a new tab.

[KoRn]

/Bump for those who may not have seen it.

[philetus]

You can also just put this:

// Enable pipelining:
user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.pipelining.maxrequests", 100);

in your user.js file.

[scab4faa]

later read

[perfect stranger]

ping

[Blue Highway]

Any idea om how to speed up the scrolling with Firefox? Seems painfully slow compared to IE 6.

I cleared the cache and set it lower than the 50000kb default and it helped a little but not much. I also tried different settings with smooth scrolling and autoscroll and not much difference there either.

[Blue Highway]

I wonder if there is a way to speed up scrolling to the speed that the page up / page down buttons scroll, with the smooth scrolling option turned on, but by pressing the up or down arrow, or clicking on the up or down scroll arrows with the mouse. The up/down arrows it is painfully slow scrolling and the mouse click over the up or down scroll arrows is even slower. This was one area that IE was quicker.

[KoRn]

Don't know the answer to that one. I can say for sure, I had very bad scrolling issues like yours, mine were caused by not yet loading the drivers for my graphics card. I'm not saying that's your problem, but it may be something to look at.

[Space Wrangler]

bookmarked

[Ronaldus Magnus Reagan]

I still prefer IE over Firefox. The main reason is adjusting text size on web pages. I am on the computer all day for work and visit many web sites. It is much less cumbersome to use IE. With IE you can put the "Size" button on your toolbar, click on it and hit "larger". With Firefox, you have to click "View", then "Text Size", then "Increase" and and then repeat all those steps AGAIN if you want to go to a even larger text size. What a hassle! The extension doesn't work with the 1.0 version.

[Hang'emAll]

Changing text size can be done easier:

Push the keys CNTL+ to increase text size and CNTL- to decrease size. I believe this works on both browsers.

[Ronaldus Magnus Reagan]

Those keyboard commands require me to sit upright and get out of my reclining position in my chair in order to use the keyboard. That's a hassle, too!

[Malsua]

One question... has a fix come out for the slowness of Firefox and Mozilla when you restore them from being minimized?

I found this answer on another forum. I have at least a GB of ram in every machine I use and they're all recent so I never noticed this minimize problem. Maybe this will help you.

--------

By default, when you minimize Firefox, it gives back to Windows most of the RAM the browser was using. It sometimes can take several seconds for the browser window to become fully loaded when you restore the window to its original size. This is one of those "version 1.0" things, in my opinion, that will become more streamlined in future bump revs of the program.

Fortunately, there's a hidden setting that can accomplish the restoration of Firefox windows much more quickly:

Step 1. Use about:config to create a new, Boolean value. Type or paste the following string into the dialog box that appears:

config.trim_on_minimize

Step 2. Click OK to close the dialog box. Change the value from "true" to "false" and restart Firefox.

This doesn't piggishly retain all of the RAM that Firefox has claimed. If Windows needs more RAM to devote to another application, Windows can take it. What the setting does is prevent Firefox from giving up most of its RAM until the memory is actually required elsewhere.

Setting this item to "false" may noticeably slow down other applications while Firefox is minimized, if your PC has less than 256 MB of RAM. If so, change the setting back to "true."

[KoRn]

Bumperzzz for all of the Firefox interest today!

[Old Professer]

I'm using Comcast with IE; I clicked on your Google link and it took 3.5 seconds.

[general_re]

Your cable connection is probably slightly faster than my DSL - for me, it took 4.2 seconds in IE, versus 4.4 in Firefox. With pipelining disabled in FF, that is, and IE doesn't implement http pipelining anyway. Enabling pipelining in FF caused that same page to take 13.9 seconds to load here, a fairly significant slowdown.

[KoRn]

You had to set something wrong. I'm on T1 speed DSL, and I've never had a page to load that slow. Recheck what you did just to be sure. Something is definitely wrong.

The changes I listed made mine, and many other FReeper's Firefox from noticeably to allot faster. Check over everything and report back, something is wrong somewhere.

[general_re]

That's the point - it shouldn't load that slow, and if pipelining is disabled, it doesn't load that slow. Enabling pipelining is what slows it down. Don't take my word for it, though - try it for yourself. Just make sure you follow the steps above, so you don't hit your local cache.

[KoRn]

Send me the URL to the site you are trying this one. Some sites don't support it. I'll check it out.