Mozilla Firefox

How to Speed Up Firefox~

firefoxI wrote a post on how to reduce Mozilla Firefox memory usage sometime ago and now I found a few more tweaks that can make your Firefox go faster. You will need to edit the configurations in Firefox by typing about:config in the address bar. Hopefully these few tricks can improve your browsing experience 😉

1. Limiting the RAM usage

By doing this tweak, you can control how much memory Firefox can use as we all know that Firefox EATS up a lot of memory sometimes. Filter up your search after “browser.cache” and select browser.cache.disk.capacity from the remaining options. The default setting goes all the way up to 50000, but there’s no need for that. You have to adjust the value depending on the amount of RAM memory you have installed. For RAM sizes between 512MB and 1GB, start with 15000. For RAM sizes between 128MB and 512M, try 5000, and you will be happy of the result.

2. Fetch Only Pages that You Click

Firefox has a built-in feature (enabled by default) that will pre-download the pages behind the links it thinks you MIGHT click. This will actually waste your internet bandwidth, CPU usage, and even your HDD space because it downloads the pages that you might not even want to see and store it in your computer. Here’s the way to disable it.

Type network.prefetch-next in the about:config page and you will see that the value is set to TRUE. Double click on the line, and it will change to False. That’s it. Firefox will only fetch the pages you click on from now on.

3. Loads Pages Faster

If you are using high speed broadband, you can try doing this tweak to make Firefox loads pages faster. Filter out the list after “network” then search for the key that says network.http.pipelining and set it to TRUE. Next, you may alter the key below (network.http.pipelining.maxrequests) and change it into a higher value – 30 for example. This means that Firefox sends 30 requests to load a page. Try it, you should see some difference here. 😉

Do you have any other tweaks? Please let me know as well 😉

An engineer which have a lot of interests in gadgets and technology stuffs. The blog varies from life events to gadgets reviews and hacks.

2 Comments

  • Z

    “(network.http.pipelining.maxrequests) and change it into a higher value – 30 for example.”

    can i change it to a higher value such as 500??

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.