Crazy FAST FireFox browsing

I was checking out http://I-Hacked.com  and came across an article on how to improve speeds of FireFox browsing.

This is ridiculously faster. I think I just cut down the time it takes me to ship out orders using https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_ship-now and my website by half. you guys should check this out.

http://www.i-hacked.com/content/view/59/42/

"
First, Lets change some hidden options to make it faster...
Open Firefox 1.0 (*I'm using 3.0.4 and this still worked*) and in the address bar type: about:config

1. Find browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs and double click on it so it = true
(* #1 wasn't in the config file for v3.0.4, so don't do it, go to #2 and #3*)
2. Find network.http.pipelining and double click on it so it = true
3. Find network.http.pipelining.maxrequests double click on it and change it from 4 to 100

What do these changes do?
1. Then enables advanced tab options in your Tools/Options page
2. This enables option #3.
3. This makes FF use 8 threads to each page.. Bascially, if you thought FF was fast before, try it after this.
"

thanks,
Kendall

sweet thanks, i did it but i cant tell a difference, how can u tell?

thanks for sharing but this is old news. i remember first seeing that in 2004.

StrictlyBudget said:

thanks for sharing but this is old news. i remember first seeing that in 2004.

Click to expand...

Yeah I had a feeling it was old from it saying to use FF 1.0.

pretty neat though. and you might need a multicore computer to be able to handle the increased amount of threads that FF will process. Should be able to tell a difference if your processor is normally just at 2-5% when surfing the next, so much extra processing that can happen!

The network.http.pipelining.maxrequests variable is not exactly threads as how one might think, as it relates to CPU processing threads.

That variable is how many different objects Firefox will download at one time.

For example, you have a plain web page with 8 pictures on it.

The first thing a browser does is get the HTML that makes up the page, and parses it. It then downloads every object that is meant to be displayed in that page.

By default, FireFox will grab up to 4 objects simultaneously - so on our plain web page with 8 pictures, only 4 of those pictures are going to be downloaded at a time. It will get 4, then it will get the next 4 once they are complete.

if we increase the network.http.pipelining.maxrequests variable, we are simply increasing the number of page elements that Firefox will download simultaneously.

Ironbar has it exactly right... It doesn't take better advantage of your CPU, it simply sends more requests to the webserver. If you have a high speed broadband connection and you're browsing huge sites with tons of bandwidth, this will speed things up... If you're on a slower connection or are browsing an underpowered site under heavy load (like this one), it'll slow things down and piss off network administrators. Some sites, in response to this hack 5 or so years ago, set their servers to throttle people who try to make too many simultaneous connections to save their servers from this kind of abuse. Basically to the webpage you're acting as 100 people browsing the site all at once... You can see why people would want to stop this.

As for a more modern approach to speed up firefox, you can download the FasterFox extension here: http://fasterfox.mozdev.org/

Also if you've tried the 3.1a development branch of firefox you can enable their new javascript engine which speeds some things *way* up, though it's still a little buggy.