I have at various times edited the about:config sections of my Mozilla Firefox.\u00a0 I’ve generally done so willy-nilly and simply followed any instructions I came upon at lifehacker or elsewhere.\u00a0 These days I’m much more familiar with Mozilla’s documentation on about:config entries so I will use this post to document:<\/p>\n
1.) What entries I am changing in about:config<\/p>\n
2.) What these changes are really doing<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Step one: find some existing documentation on speading up FF via about:config: Here’s one!<\/a><\/p>\n This recommends that I change the value network.http.pipelining<\/em> .\u00a0 But what does this do?\u00a0 The Mozilla wiki’s<\/a> documentation is pretty verbose on the subject:<\/p>\n In HTTP 1.1, multiple requests can be sent before any responses are received. This is known as pipelining<\/a> . Pipelining reduces network load and can reduce page loading times over high-latency connections, but not all servers support it. Some servers may even behave incorrectly if they receive pipelined requests. If a proxy server is not configured, this preference controls whether to attempt to use pipelining.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Excellent!\u00a0 I rarely use a proxy so I am going to go ahead and change this setting to true and start using pipelining.<\/p>\n The next suggestion is to allow 15 simultaneous pipelines to a given webserver instead of the default 4.\u00a0 Networking.http.pipelining.maxrequests<\/a> states that this can be any number from 1 to 8 inclusive.\u00a0 Glad I checked this one!\u00a0 I am going to give 4 a shot and up it if nothing breaks.\u00a0 Also networking.http.pipelining.ssl<\/a> will turn on pipelining for secure websites only, which avoids some common proxy problems.<\/p>\n The next article<\/a> suggests editing Network.prefetch-next<\/a> .\u00a0 This starts downloading websites before you click on them.\u00a0 This gives a great speed boost to browsing, but it eats ram.\u00a0 I am running on less ram than I would like, and am liberal with my tabs, so I am going to disable this setting. (wish me luck!)<\/p>\n I don’t spell very well.\u00a0 So I would like my spellchecker to be enabled for single word or line forms as well as longer text boxes.\u00a0 This is the layout.spellcheckDefault setting, I set it on 2 for every form.<\/p>\n This article covers several speed tweaks now:<\/p>\n Some of these are kind of bizarre.\u00a0 The maxrequests uses the correct number (8), but thinks that it was set to 30 previously.\u00a0 These instructions also set pipelining on, and then turn it on again for ssl connections, which isn’t necessary.\u00a0 Network.http.max-connections<\/a> seems to do exactly what it sounds like and enables you to have more active connections downloading at once.<\/p>\n Next on my list is network.http.pipelining false to true<\/strong>
\nnetwork.http.pipelining.maxrequests 30 to 8<\/strong>
\nnetwork.http.max-connections 30 to 96<\/strong>
\nnetwork.http.max-connections-per-server 15 to 32<\/strong>
\nnetwork.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server 6 to 8<\/strong>
\nnetwork.http.pipelining.ssl false to true<\/strong>
\nnetwork.http.proxy.pipelining false to true<\/strong> <\/code><\/p><\/blockquote>\nbrowser.sessionstore.max_tabs_undo.\u00a0 This is the undo closed tab feature.\u00a0 I've never needed to unclose more than 3 previous tabs.\u00a0 I am going to set this to 5.\u00a0 I hope that this will save some ram and I pray 'that god send me no need of thee'.<\/code><\/p>\n