Mozilla Firefox Tweaking.

[Dxon]

I hope this is the right thread though. But here we go! :)

And yes, firefox is already pretty damn fast but did you know that you can tweak it and improve the speed even more?

That's the beauty of this program being open source.
Here's what you do:
In the URL bar, type “about:config” and press enter. This will bring up the configuration “menu” where you can change the parameters of Firefox.

Note that these are what I’ve found to REALLY speed up my Firefox significantly - and these settings seem to be common among everybody else as well. But these settings are optimized for broadband connections - I mean with as much concurrent requests we’re going to open up with pipelining… lol… you’d better have a big connection.

Double Click on the following settings and put in the numbers below - for the true / false booleans - they’ll change when you double click.

Code:
browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs – true
network.http.max-connections – 48
network.http.max-connections-per-server – 16
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy – 8
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server – 4
network.http.pipelining – true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests – 100
network.http.proxy.pipelining – true
network.http.request.timeout – 300


One more thing… Right-click somewhere on that screen and add a NEW -> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0”. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. Since you’re broadband - it shouldn’t have to wait.

Now you should notice you’re loading pages MUCH faster now!

[ComposerOfRequiems]

Protip: Use Opera.

[Eris]

I've found that most of these guides are just cargo cult programming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming) (or more specifically cargo cult tweaking, but there's no wikipedia article on that). Someone has found a guide somewhere on the internet suggesting that this makes firefox faster, so they do it themselves, but with higher values; or just randomly tinker with the values with no understanding of what they do, until they find a setting that they feel is faster. Of course, they have no understanding of what these settings do, for for all they know, they may be inadvertently make the browser highly unstable, or flood all servers they connect to with hundreds of superfluous connections.

[wizz-o-matic]

nothing new >_> Get fasterfox extension and everything is set automatically

And that actually doesn't make the browser faster ... only the page rendering appears faster, and that's all. FF as browser is pretty much the slowest one.

[Aizmov]

FireFox is nice and all, but I prefer Safari and Konqurer, the fastest I've ever tried. IE is the worst. Opera is nice to use, and has very nice features, a bit better than FireFox, but not a favorite of mine.
Konqurer is going cross-platform, an alpha version of Konqurer has been released for Windows.
Safari on Windows is still a beta and no version is planned for GNU/Linux, but Safari and Konqurer share the rendering engine, sort of. Future Konqurer will be based on WebKit, Safari's rendering engine.
WebKit itself was based on KHTML, the rendering engine of Konqurer.

[Eris]

FireFox is nice and all, but I prefer Safari and Konqurer, the fastest I've ever tried. IE is the worst. Opera is nice to use, and has very nice features, a bit better than FireFox, but not a favorite of mine.
Konqurer is going cross-platform, an alpha version of Konqurer has been released for Windows.
Safari on Windows is still a beta and no version is planned for GNU/Linux, but Safari and Konqurer share the rendering engine, sort of. Future Konqurer will be based on WebKit, Safari's rendering engine.
WebKit itself was based on KHTML, the rendering engine of Konqurer.

IE is pretty fast, until you actually go online, and it instantaneously contracts every variety of spyware and virus on the internets (like that dirty kid in peanuts). Then it's slow as molasses.

[wizz-o-matic]

IE is pretty fast, until you actually go online, and it instantaneously contracts every variety of spyware and virus on the internets (like that dirty kid in peanuts). Then it's slow as molasses.
That happens if the user is stupid >_>

I mean ... every spyware and virus you can get in IE you can get in FF too. As security, IE 7 is way more secure than FF. if you use IE 6 ... well, you're an idiot ...

The best FF was 0.7 ... when it got 1.0 it started to become lame, the worst version was 1.5. The 2.0 is a bit better, but damn slow, if you compare it to the old 0.7.

Actually, the only good point in FF would be a slight faster rendering of sites, well, at least it seems faster ... and a crapload of customization stuff.

[Aizmov]

IE is pretty fast, until you actually go online, and it instantaneously contracts every variety of spyware and virus on the internets (like that dirty kid in peanuts). Then it's slow as molasses.

What makes IE fast is, it is a Windows component, it is integrated into the Windows Exploder.
Yet, the alpha version of Konqurer I tried on Windows, starts up faster and renders faster. Same applies to Safari beta.

[Eris]

That happens if the user is stupid >_>

I mean ... every spyware and virus you can get in IE you can get in FF too. As security, IE 7 is way more secure than FF. if you use IE 6 ... well, you're an idiot ...

Not really. IE is, as Azimov also said, an integrated component. It means that it's essentially part of the same program as the rest of the OS. So, if you get control over IE, you get control over the entire OS. If you get control over firefox, you get control over firefox and firefox alone. IE spyware is not compatible with Firefox (and vice versa.)

[Dxon]

I got windows and Safari has to many bugs and security leaks. Look it up. It's true.

I don't know about opera. People say Opera is great. But I'm used to FireFox so I'll just stick with FF. :)

[Aizmov]

I got windows and Safari has to many bugs and security leaks. Look it up. It's true.


But it looks good, the Aqua theme and all, plus no matter how many security holes, I'm betting they are nothing compared to IE :)
Earlier Beta releases were very buggy and crashed too often, the latest Beta of Safari is exponentially more stable, rarely crashes on me.

[wizz-o-matic]

Not really. IE is, as Azimov also said, an integrated component. It means that it's essentially part of the same program as the rest of the OS. So, if you get control over IE, you get control over the entire OS. If you get control over firefox, you get control over firefox and firefox alone. IE spyware is not compatible with Firefox (and vice versa.)
If you're smart to get control over FF it's not that hard to get to the OS from there ;)
Hell, I bet it's faster to get control over FF than IE. Did I mention that IE is more secure than FF? I guess I did ...

It's funny how people think that if something is opensource that it's also safer than everything else. The whole opensource term makes it more insecure, since everyone can check its source, and find a backdoor.

Well, if FF was a true opensource, it wouldn't really be so bad, but lately the mozilla people actually only think about the money, and not the actual performance of their programs >__>;

[qG.Shogun]

Im currently using firefox for almost 2 years and i won't change it thats for sure its fast enough for me.

And the information you gave i already knew that but thnx anyway.

[Aizmov]

It's funny how people think that if something is opensource that it's also safer than everything else. The whole opensource term makes it more insecure, since everyone can check its source, and find a backdoor.



Flawed logic!
The most secure OS in the world, OpenBSD, is open source. A lot of companies and agencies use open source OSes because they are more secure. Most of ISPs and firewalls are powered by open source OSes.

The power of open source is that since the source is open flawes are soon discovered and fixed, and since the source is open you can check and remove any backdoors in it, and publish your fixes.

[Dxon]

Flawed logic!
The most secure OS in the world, OpenBSD, is open source. A lot of companies and agencies use open source OSes because they are more secure. Most of ISPs and firewalls are powered by open source OSes.

The power of open source is that since the source is open flawed are soon discovered and fixed, and since the source is open you can check and remove any backdoors in it, and publish your fixes.

That's so smart. I just use FireFox because I can edit it in any way I want. Hell, if I want to make my own skin I make my own skin.

[demonplight]

Actually fire fox because it is open source is very secure, people all around the world look at its code, and tinker with it, and the improvements that they make are check then if approved go into the next build. in addition no ones browser is secure if you do not have a fire wall, anti virus, anti spy ware, and anti phisher scanner. and don't you know the best of those are open source too.
but in all reality if you are using a windows machine like the one I am typing on the only way to really increase the speed of you connection is to patch you either net driver, and to tweek the OS settings. this to applies to Linux, and its many variants. then you too can enjoy 8 megs up and 8 megs down. like me:p