Web browsers have evolved a lot since the last decade and we have seen many participants trying hard to get a bite of the market share. The monopoly of Microsoft Internet Explorer has ended, and now it too has to provide better facilities, so as to retain its users. The open source market has grown big. We now see the advent of many browsers which are better and faster than the previously available only browsers, which lacked many features and had many bugs
The present market holding of Firefox as internet browser has climbed from 20 percent to 21.48 percent. The advantage it provides over the other remaining browsers is the reason for its increasing market growth. In this article we will discuss about some major tricks and techniques to speed up Firefox according to our needs.
There are generally three types of Firefox User adjustments:
- A normal user, who downloads and install the file from the official website and runs it as it is available, without making any changes to the downloaded Firefox version.
- An experimental user, who installs varied extensions, such as themes and third party plug-ins, to suit his/her own way of look and feel, of the Firefox browser.
- An advanced user, who tweaks settings and functionality, to get the optimum performance. He/she makes some changes to the main program module and hence speeds up Firefox browsing experience.
This article is meant for advanced user utilization. Let us see how we can make the Firefox web browser run faster.
- Open Firefox and type the following command in the address bar. “about:config”
- Now a warning message will pop up in the centre of the Firefox Screen. Select the “I’ll wll be careful. I promise”, button.
- Now you will be inside the main control panel of the Firefox browser. Be careful before you start running around making changes. This might crash your browser as well.
- In the filter panel type “network.http.keep-alive”. Now set option true as shown in the image below.
- Search for “network.http.version”. Set the version to 1.1 as shown under.
- Now in the search box type “network.http.pipelining”. Set the value to true. You can do it by double clicking the menu to be changed.
- Type “network.http.proxy.pipelining” in the address bar. Change the value to true by double clicking it.
- Now we need to set the number of connection requests. Find “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” in the address bar. Change the vale to 8. This will speed up the Firefox maximum requests simultaneously for a page. You might think we can change it to more than 8, but we cannot, as it is capped at 8 requests max.
- By now we have set all the network parameters to its maximum limit. Now when the page gets loaded inside the Firefox web browser it is not shown immediately. The browser loads the page and only after a certain amount of time it displays it in the browser window. We can tweak this for speeding up Firefox view page display time. For this we need to create a new property called “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to zero. Right click anywhere inside the window and select New à Integer à name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and then set the integer value to Zero. Look the image below for proper understanding.
- Lastly disable all add-ons if you are in no need of flash and other heavy programs such as download accelerator or anything. Strip off the themes to default and now we are ready to rock and roll.
If you have successfully carried out all the instruction inside the Firefox settings, you will definitely find the speed increase of the browser by a minimum of 40 percent. If by mistake, you have changed or modified any other values you will need to reset the Firefox completely and again carry out the instructions again.
Additional Tips to make Firefox run faster
Sometimes you may find that you have everything in place and have cleared off everything junk from the hard drive yet your Firefox browser tends to open up very slowly.
This generally happens if you browse more each day. Firefox keeps a tab of every visited webpage and stores the date, time and name of the webpage visited. So if you have not set any limit for the history this junk might pile up and can cause the Firefox browser to slow down in drastic manner. This happens every time when your Firefox browser triggers any major actions. So it is always advisable to shrink off the history at its minimum required level.
Clear history when Firefox Closes
- If you want to set it to some custom amount of time, go to tools –> options –> Privacy
- Select custom settings for history. Deselect “Remember download history”, “Remember search and form history”.
- Now select the “Settings” box beside the “Clear history when Firefox closes”.
- Select every check box but leave “Browsing history” and “Saved Passwords”.
- Click “OK” and then on the main option panel select “Ok” again.
Completely remove all History
- Open Firefox and go to tools –> Options –> Privacy
- Select never remember history.
- Also clear all previous history data by selecting the “clear all current history” option.
Before you delete your history data you must know that it is an irreversible process. Once you have deleted all your data from the history tab you can never get it back. So be wise before you completely erase off your junk history database.
Feel free to leave a message, on what difference did you find or if any more suggestions that you have discovered. We are always eager to learn more and share more through this site.
