Mozilla’s Firefox has been arguably the best web browser for the last couple of years and has outperformed other popular browsers like Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari consistently. What makes Firefox better is its simple architecture, well thought out functionality and its speed. But even Firefox can be made faster by tweaking its settings a little, and here we take a look at how it is done.
1. For sending continuous request to any website, enable pipelining from your Firefox browser. To do this, type “about:config” in your address bar and click on the options “network.http.pipelining” and “network.http.proxy.pipelining” and for selecting the maximum number of requests sent at once, go to “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” and set it with a desired value.
2. It takes time to load a page if Firefox keeps on displaying what it has after its allotted interval, which in general is quite small (about 0.12 seconds); and so change it to a much greater value by following this navigation: type about:config->New->Integer->type content.notify.interval->set a high value like 20000->New->Boolean->content.notify.ontimer->True.
3. Decrease the content switch threshold by going to New->Integer->content.switch.threshold and select a low value like 100000 which means one tenth of a second; this decreases the response time of the browser considerably.
4. If flash animations pop up every time you are browsing the internet, it would probably slow down your work. If it is so, then there is a very easy way to get rid of this by downloading FlashBlock Extension and it will block all the flash animations that appear and keep them in the place holder so that you can check them later.
5. Cache is the temporary memory that keeps track of the last few visited sites. Reloading them takes very little time as they are loaded directly from it. If the cache size is increased, Firefox runs faster, and to do so type about:config->New->Integer->Select browser.cache.memory.capacity and enter a high value to get the bigger cache.
6. If you have a slow internet connection, Firefox performs best if it is used with a data compression tool like toolnet. Not only does it compress data but lets all the data pass through its own server making the response much faster. And it can be downloaded very easily as well.
7. Lastly, Firefox can get slow if any other application tries to run while a page is being loaded, to stop this go to: New->Boolean->content.interrupt.parsing->select False. This stops every other application until your page loads properly.
