Get The Most Out Of FireFox (BroadBand Users)

[thisistoto]

I did what this lil guide told me, and now I'm flying!


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I thought that maybe this was a load of crap.. but I gave it a shot anyway and firefox really cooks now:

forevergeek.com has a useful guide on speeding up firefox for broadband users. basically after getting to the hidden config settings you set the browser to request more data that it usually does.

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. 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 receives.

4. Right-click anywhere and select New-> Boolean.
Name it "browser.turbo.enabled" and set its value to "True"

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http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/007164.html

After seeing at least a couple dozen blog posts all referencing these changes to "speed up Firefox", I thought it would be worth a little explanation.

Yes, enabling HTTP pipelining can dramatically improve networking performance. The downside, and the reason it's not enabled by default, is that it can prevent Web pages from displaying correctly. If you've enabled this, and you find pages that aren't displaying correctly, please don't blame Firefox or the Web developer. It's probably the fact that you enabled an "unsupported" feature which is incompatible with some Web servers and proxy servers.

The second change, setting the initial paint delay at zero, may get you some content on the screen faster, but it's worth noting that it will dramatically slow down the time it takes the entire page to display. Here's what's going on. Gecko, Firefox's rendering engine, is trying to optimize between the cost of waiting for a bit more data versus doing more painting and reflows as new data comes in. Waiting a bit longer before it starts painting the page gives Gecko a chance to receive more content before chewing up CPU cycles to render and reflow the document. If you drop this value down to zero or near zero, that means you'll see the page start displaying a bit earlier, but not having received much data in that short interval, you'll have a lot more paint and reflow cycles to complete rendering of the page.

This one probably comes down to a combination of bandwidth, CPU speed, and personal preference. If it works for you, and you don't mind the side-effects, then great. Just note that what works for one person/system, may not work for another.

Yes, there are tuning change you can make (even at compile time, see Moox' optimized builds) that will dramatically alter the performance characteristics of Firefox. Feel free to experiment, but remember that most of the defaults are defaults for a reason. If your browser starts misbehaving or web sites look broken, it might be worth going back to default settings.

[thisistoto]

Well, there has been a dramatic difference for me

dramatic increase in stress on webservers as well.

you'd be better off setting those back to the default and using an optimized build of firefox made specificly for your processor

btw, browser.turbo.enabled does absolutely nothing if you're using firefox 1.0.

oh yeah and i like your signature.
my favorite lyric.

Firefox rules!

[The Wicker Man]

Originally Posted by motionblur

Firefox rules!

Eastwood Speaks Russian too

[thisistoto]

You are pretty serious about FireFox arnt you Gurt?

Originally Posted by thisistoto

You are pretty serious about FireFox arnt you Gurt?

sort of.
i've been keeping up with it since 0.5

[thisistoto]

Well I mean, you do have the FireFox symbol in your Stealie

[wattershed]

You're a real asshole to anybody who's ever run a website that isn't backed by a massive akamai server farm if you set some of those options to something other than the default. Joe blow's website is set up to handle one request at a time from all its users, not 30 from your spazzed out client.

If you're on this website there's a decent chance you understand the benefits of sharing what you reap; to me, changing the pipelining and maxreqs is basically the same as capping your upload to 2 kb/s on a torrent. Bad internet karma.

[basspro676]

definatly running faster and I haven't found any glithches yet, thanks for the info dude.

[undeath]

Originally Posted by wattershed

You're a real asshole to anybody who's ever run a website that isn't backed by a massive akamai server farm if you set some of those options to something other than the default. Joe blow's website is set up to handle one request at a time from all its users, not 30 from your spazzed out client.

If you're on this website there's a decent chance you understand the benefits of sharing what you reap; to me, changing the pipelining and maxreqs is basically the same as capping your upload to 2 kb/s on a torrent. Bad internet karma.

Oh no! It's the end of the world!

Hey, Wicker! Can we please have this one as next week's sign the apocalypse is upon us? Pretty please?!?!?

[wattershed]

Blow it off all you want, but you're a prick if you juice your shit out at the expense of the hardware of the website providing you your information.

Why don't you set up a webpage, then I'll go ahead and hammer the hell out of it with requests until the server crashes? I mean, it's my right, right? No harm in getting something for myself at the expense of others, right?

[undeath]

Like I would give a shit if someone fucked with my website...

I allowed it the entire few months I had a temporary site up. One of the things was seeing how much it could take. Didn't affect it all too much, I have to say...

[undeath]

Besides, I'm not using those modfications...