Make your Firefox run a little bit faster

This article is not written by me. It is just a trick that I stumbled onto online, and thought it is really good.


Note: You must have a (preferably fast) broadband connection. If you have dial-up, stop reading, forget it, pipelining isn’t for you.
Also, if you don’t use Firefox, please download it. You won’t regret it:

In normal Microsoft fashion, Internet Explorer doesn’t support pipelining (even IE7)

1. Open a new tab in Firefox (Ctrl+T) and type “about:config” (without the quotes) in your address bar.
2. In the “Filter:” search box, type “network.http” (again, without the quotes.) You don’t have to hit enter.
   • Look for the “network.http.keep-alive” setting and make sure it’s set to “true”. If it’s “false,” double-click that line and it will change to true.
   • On the same page, look for “network.http.version” and make sure it’s set to “1.1″
3. Now clear out the Filter box and type in “pipelining”
   • Look for “network.http.pipelining” Right-click on that line, and click on “toggle” and be sure the value is set to “true” (or double-click to toggle values.)
   • If you’re on a proxy, look for “network.http.proxy.pipelining” Right-click on that line, and click on “toggle” and be sure the value is set to “true”. If you don’t know if you’re on a proxy or not, just set it to “true” anyway. It won’t hurt anything.
   • Lastly, look for “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” Right-click on that line, click on “modify” and set the value to 8. You can set it anywhere between 1 and 8. If you notice your internet is acting weird after this, try decreasing this value.
4. Keep in mind that this may not agree with some web servers, and therefore break the webpage. I have not personally experienced this yet, but this feature is still in testing, and that’s why it’s not set to “true” by default.

There you have it. Ignore the sites telling you to set the value to “30.” Those same pages will also tell you to create a new value called “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and to set that value to “0″. All this does is start displaying the information on the webpage sooner. nglayout.initialpaint.delay does not make your page load faster. In fact, it can make it load slower; especially on slower connections. If you create this value and set it to “0″ you will notice the page beginning to render right away, but it will take longer to finish completely.

Read the full article here. http://egonitron.com/2007/05/25/the-truth-about-the-firefox-pipelining-trick/