4 Possible Ways to Enhance Speed of Firefox


Firefox is my favorite browser. But It may be slow at times. We previously discussed about ways to Make Firefox faster and 10 add-ons to optimize Firefox performance. Now, here are 4 tweaks which will enhance speed of Firefox.

In order to make these changes, open your Firefox Browser and type " about:config ” in the address bar and hit ENTER. You will see a page like the screenshot below. Search for the option by typing in the Preference Name in the Filter and make necessary changes to it. The modifications required for the preference names are explained as follows..

Firefox about-config

  • The network.http.max-connections setting determines how many simultaneous HTTP connections can be made. The default is 24 on most installations, but if you’re on a fast connection, try increasing this value to, say, 48 to allow for more open connections thereby speeding up browsing of multiple pages.

By increasing the value of this setting you’re only raising the maximum possible number of connections, not increasing the actual number of connections Firefox makes every time.

 

  • Network.http.max-connections-per server determines how many simultaneous connections can be made to a single server. The default is 8 or so. Try increasing the value for fast connections to something like 16 in an attempt to increase browsing speed. Setting this value very high, in conjunction with a high value for the settings mentioned after this one, could be interpreted by some servers as a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, and your connection could be refused.

It may also actually slow down your browsing, and it’s poor netiquette to pound servers with lots of connections from a single machine. Therefore, experiment with this value, but don’t go too high.

 

  • If you are connected to a proxy, network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy determines how many connections to keep alive at any time. The default is 4; you can try a higher value (such as 8) to improve speeds.

Raising this to a very high value will stress out the proxy server, and may ultimately result in slower browsing for everyone on the proxy. So this one depends on if you’re callous and selfish if it does lead to a performance increase, that is.

 

  • If you are not connected to a proxy, network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server determines how many connections to a single server to keep alive at any time. The default is probably 2; you can attempt a higher value (such as 4 or 8) to improve speeds.

Similar to what was mentioned above, raising this to a very high value will stress the server you’re connected to, and will either result in a refused connection, or slower response times from the Web page for every person trying to connect to it.

Filed under: Firefox
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June 22, 2009 by: Prasanth Chandra

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