18 Firefox Tweaks to Improve Speed and Performance

The best thing about Firefox is the way it lets you do whatever you like with it. If you love the fox as much as I do, and have shunned all the other browsers for Firefox like I have, but cant help being frustrated when sometimes it slows down because you have 40 tabs open in four different windows, or you can’t afford to upgrade your RAM to a reasonable amount… yet (like me), here’s something that will cheer you up. It doesn’t matter if you are a computer rookie or a seasoned veteran in this field, these few easy-to-do tweaks will really get Firefox performing just as fast as you want it to; probably even faster.

By tweaking the way Firefox handles some caching functions, you can improve the page load speed and even free up the RAM it is hogging while minimized. Do not fear if you have never touched your configuration file before, just follow these simple steps and you’ll have it done in no time.

I’d still suggest you grab a pen and jot down the settings that you change, incase you are not happy with them and may want to revert back to the default settings.

Just remember to re-start Firefox after every setting change.

Reduce Firefox’s RAM Usage for Its Cache Feature

1. Type “about:config” (without quotes) in the address bar of your Firefox and press Enter.

2. Find “browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer”

3. Set the value to “0” (Zero)

Cut Down Ram Usage to 10 MB when Firefox is Minimized

1. Type “about:config” (without quotes) in the address bar of your Firefox and press Enter.

2. Right click in the page and select “New” > “Boolean”

3. In the pop-up box that appears, enter “config.trim_on_minimize” and hit Enter

4. Select True and press Enter.

Increase the Page Load Speed of Firefox

Normally the browser makes one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining, it will make several requests at once, which really speeds up page loading.

1. Type “about:config” (without quotes) in the address bar of your Firefox and press Enter.

2. Find and Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”

3. Find and Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”

4. Find and Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like “10”. (Meaning that it will make 10 requests at once.)

5. right click anywhere in the configuration window and from the pop-up menu select: “New” > “Integer”

Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay”

Set its value to “0” (Zero)

This value represents the amount of time the browser waits before acting upon the information it has received. If you are using a broadband connection, your pages will load faster now.

Get Even Faster Web Browsing

1. Type “about:config” (without quotes) in the address bar of your Firefox and press Enter.

2. Right click in the window and choose “New” > “Integer” or “String”

3. Enter “network.dns.disableIPv6” in the pop-up box and set value to “false”.

4. Repeat step 2, and enter “content.notify.backoffcount” in the pop-up box and set value to “5”.

5. Repeat step 2 and enter “plugin.expose_full_path” and set value to “true”.

6. Repeat step 2 and enter “ui.submenuDelay” and set value to “0” (Zero).

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