How to make firefox even faster (Tip for dial-up users)

Internet ^

[Asphalt]

A while ago I posted how to speed up Firefox with a broadband connection. If you missed that, click here

Below are tips for how to make a dial-up connection fast. Before you do it, if you are a bit nervous, remember that I haven't tried these as I have a broadband connection. So, do it at your own risk, but remember that you can always undo any changes.

[Asphalt]

To change values type "about:config" in your address bar. Not http://about:config, just the words "about:config: with the colon in the middle, and you will get a long list of a few hundred setting. They should be in alphabetical order.To change something from true to false, right-click, and select "toggle", to change a value, right-click and select modify, and change the number. To make a new value, right-click anywhere and select "new" and the "integer" or whatever.

For Dial-up:

browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl : true
browser.xul.error_pages.enabled : true

content.interrupt.parsing : true
content.max.tokenizing.time : 3000000
content.maxtextrun : 8191
content.notify.backoffcount : 5
content.notify.interval : 750000
content.notify.ontimer : true

content.switch.threshold : 750000
network.http.max-connections : 32
network.http.max-connections-per-server : 8
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy : 8
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server : 4
network.http.pipelining : true

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests : 8
network.http.proxy.pipelining : true
nglayout.initialpaint.delay : 750
plugin.expose_full_path : true
signed.applets.codebase_principal_support : true

[general_re]

Caching SSL sessions kind of defeats the purpose of securing them - someone with access to your machine will be able to dig out all kinds of stuff from the browser cache, so I'm not sure that one's such a hot idea.

[Asphalt]

Some of your dial-up pingees might find this helpful. As I've said, I haven't tried it as I have high-speed internet.

[ShadowAce]

[Asphalt]

To you three who were grousing on the other thread, here's for dial-up users, hope it works.

[ncpatriot]

Thanks!

[processing please hold]

Thanks.

If you never hear from me again...you'll know why. LOLOL

[processing please hold]

Caching SSL sessions

I don't know what that means, also

securing them - someone with access to your machine

No one but me has access to my machine, also

able to dig out all kinds of stuff from the browser cache,

I don't know what that means either.

Ignorance is bliss...so they say. :-)

[processing please hold]

I've bookmarked this thread. When my daughter comes over tonight for supper, I'll put this in her hands. That way, if she messes up...I can blame her. :-)

[general_re]

What the browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl setting does is causes your browser to cache SSL sessions locally. What does that mean? Your browser, by default, stores stuff from remote websites in a local cache - basically, when it grabs images, text, etc. from a website, it saves them locally so that next time you pull up that website, it can just load them from the local cache, which is much faster than fetching them from the webserver again.

Okay, so what? SSL connections are secure, encrypted communications between your browser and a remote website - like, say, your bank, as you're reviewing your account balance. They're secured so that nobody can intercept them while in transit, and gather your account number, password, etc., and make trouble for you later. Part of that security is not storing information from that secure connection locally, so that nobody can bypass the encryption by getting into your machine and reading the info from the disk cache. Mainly, this will be a problem when you (someday) dispose of the computer - unless you take steps to securely wipe the disks, whoever gets hold of it could potentially read all kinds of interesting things about you.

Anyway, realistically speaking, there isn't a heck of a lot you can really do to speed up dial-up connections - the bottleneck is the phone line, not the browser, so tweaking the browser won't do much for you. It might make it feel faster in some cases, but it's not going to actually make it faster.

[swmobuffalo]

Has anybody actually done this with their browser yet?

[Asphalt]

I haven't. Try it, if it doesn't work, it's easy to change it back. Just write down the old values.

[beezdotcom]

the bottleneck is the phone line, not the browser, so tweaking the browser won't do much for you. It might make it feel faster in some cases, but it's not going to actually make it faster.

That's a pretty broad statement. Sure, the phone line is the MAIN bottleneck - but there are lots of other configurable parameters that can potentially create noticeable changes.

[general_re]

Like what? The paintdelay and the SSL cache are about the only things I can see that might make a noticeable difference. And even then, dropping the paint delay just changes how the browser displays page elements it receives - it doesn't cause it to receive them any faster than before, so any speed improvement you see is purely psychological. Enabling pipelining doesn't do much in most cases - most servers still don't enable pipelining by default, so they'll still process your GET requests serially, the same way as before. And even if they do implement pipelining, having multiple GETs in flight doesn't magically make the server able to stuff more data down the line than the modem can handle - it'll help somewhat on high latency connections, but it's not going to make a modem feel like broadband, no matter what.

Sure, you can nibble around the edges if you want, but 99.5% of the problem is beyond your control, no matter how much tweaking you do. The default config is really just fine for most people.

[beezdotcom]

it'll help somewhat on high latency connections, but it's not going to make a modem feel like broadband, no matter what.

These two statements aren't mutually exclusive, so?

[general_re]

They weren't intended to be mutually exclusive - if you find one of the (few) servers that implements pipelining, and it isn't on FF's internal pipelining blacklist, and it's not the first request to the server (which is never pipelined no matter what) there might be some slight improvement in transfer times, but again, not enough to make much of a noticeable difference in most cases for most people. What would be more noticeable is if you were on a fast high-latency connection, like satellite, where it takes a long time to set up and tear down connections, but once in place, they move quickly.

And some of these recommendations violate the HTTP 1.1 spec pretty blatently, and are likely to be ignored by many servers anyway. 4 persistent connections? Try 2.

[FoxInSocks]

Thank you! I'll give it a whirl this evening.

[PJ-Comix]

I will soon be going over to a cable connection. BTW, about 10 minutes ago I upgraded to FireFox 1.0.4. So what am I going to find different from the original FireFox version that I had previously. So far, everything looks the same.

[raybbr]

Is there a similar thread to speeding up Mozilla on dial-up?

TIA

[flewggle]

Thanks for your post. I blows me away that anyone knows enough about a browser to be able to write a config change like you, I wish I was one of them! lol That being said there is a website Ive visited that has a list of easy to perform simple tips that speeds up dial up internet browsing quite a bit. I plan on making your config change in addition the changes Ive found at this website. How to make dial up faster