[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.