From lifehack.org’s sister site, MyTips Wiki has noted some good tips for Firefox which can increase your Firefox performance greatly. I would like to share the current up-to-date information to readers:
How to speed up the rendering of a page?
Add the following perference, firefox will render the page immediately:
- Ctrl-L to go to the URL entry
- Type about:config to open the configuration editor
- Right click -> New -> Integer
- Type nglayout.initialpaint.delay as the perference name
- Type 0 as the value
How to increase the page loading performance?
You can try to enable pipelining. It is still an experimental feature, so it may not be supported by some web servers.
- Ctrl-L to go to the URL entry
- Type about:config to open the configuration editor
- Right click -> New -> Boolean -> type network.http.pipelining, select true
- Right click -> New -> Boolean -> type network.http.proxy.pipelining, select true
- Right click -> New -> Integer -> type network.http.pipelining.maxrequests, type 8
How can I speed up the Firefox startup time in Windows XP?
This is more like a general tips for Windows XP but here it is. You can turn on the prefetcher that available in Windows XP.
- Right click on Firefox icon and press properties
- Type /Prefetch:1 at the end of command in target field.
- For instance “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” /Prefetch:1 (Make sure you have space in between firefox.exe” and /Prefetch:1)
- Press OK to save
Got any tips on Firefox or/and other things? Feel free to contribute your notes and thoughts to the Wiki.
Firefox Tips – [MyTips.Info Wiki]
Up-to-date? Hardly. HTML Pipelining is not all it’s cracked up to be:
http://forums.rimuhosting.com/forums/showthread.php?s=abcb117221b2b7142b1b71c3bec462e3&p=270#post270
Note that several web- and proxy servers still break horribly if you try to use pipelining. If you suddenly start seeing websites render badly, that’s why. (This is also the reason this preference hasn’t been enabled by default.)
Setting maxrequests high is also a bad idea, as just a couple of people having done that and visiting at the same time can very swiftly bring a small webserver (which often have a limit like 100 concurrent requests) to its knees.
And finally paint delay set to 0 will actually make the total rendering time take longer, as there’s much more reflowing happening. Basically with this pref set, painting starts right at the moment that the first bits of data come in, so everything _seems_ snappier (especially on a really fast connection), but the cost is content moving all over the screen…
Don’t just take my word from it either, someone like Asa Dotzler (Firefox QA honcho) says the same: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/007164.html
heard prefetch is pretty much bs, according to many users at the firefox forum @ mozilla’s site.
A quicker link to the URL entry is F6, its the general windows shortcut and makes life alot nicer
[...] Remember when we want to tweak firefox settings, we have to go through the about:config manually to add parameters? There is a easier way now. Fasterfox is a performance and network tweaks extension for Firefox which allow you tweak many settings within Firefox – such as modifying all those settings for prefetch links and network settings. In addition, there is a built in popup blockers and page load timer to calculate your modified settings. Here are the description for its features: [...]
[...] Up-to-date Tips: Increasing Firefox Performance [...]
You can test the effect of /Prefetch:1 yourself: look in your Windows\Prefetch directory (that’s where it is in XP, Vista may well be different), and delete all the files starting with “FIREFOX” then start and close Firefox without the /Prefetch:1 flag. Now you have one prefetch file, because it’s actually turned on without needing a flag. Add the flag to your shortcut, start and close again. You still have just that one prefetch file, because the flag is case-sensitive, and it’s supposed to be /prefetch:1. Change to that, start and close Firefox, and you’ll see that you have a second prefetch file, because you just told the prefetcher that this shortcut starts up Firefox in a different way, to do different things, and will load different dlls. So the very best thing that tip could do is nothing but add an “unrecognized commandline flag” error to Firefox’s error console, and the worst thing it can do, if it’s corrected to actually have an effect, is make the first run after it is used a little bit slower to start up.
The /prefetch:1 switch is a myth and will do nothing.
This “tip” is based on a number of misunderstandings about how prefetch works. Prefetch does not preload applications at bootup. Windows will create and use a prefetch file whether this flag is present or not. Prefetch files are used to optimize boot and application load performance.
Check this blog by Ryan Myers, a Microsoft software engineer on the XP performance team.
http://blogs.msdn.com/ryanmy/archive/2005/05/25/421882.aspx
Larry Miller
Microsoft MCSA
but that /prefetch made a noticable difference in XP SP3