Improving Firefox Performance

You may or may not have noticed, but since the heady days of late FF2, Firefox has apparently gotten slower on some websites with deeply nested links. I don't know why this is, but it just seems to hang for (sometimes) several seconds on such sites. Friends and work colleagues have complained of exactly the same thing, on exactly the same sites.

This bugs me. There's not much I can do about it (except wait) and I've moved to FF3 now, like most people, so I'm not too enamoured with downgrading. IE7 and 8 are simply awful, Chrome is... I'm not really sure yet, and SeaMonkey, Flock and the rest are not at all bad, but not great.

I suppose what I'm saying is that I'm an add-on junky, and I'm not going to go cold turkey no matter how slow it gets.

FF3 is also woefully slow to start up. So what to do about it?

For the slow startup:

• Add /Prefetch:1 to your the end of your FF3 shortcut target, e.g. right click on the shortcut, click properties, add /Prefetch:1 after the target (put a space between them)

For the general slowness:

Open a new tab, type about:config in the address bar. You can either change the following values (if they exist) or change them:

• Enable pipelining to get pages to load faster - it might not work well for you, so if changing away from the default settings, be sure to take note of them so you can revert to them later if needed:

1. network.http.pipelining : true
2. network.http.proxy.pipelining : true
3. network.http.pipelining.maxrequests : 8

• Change the initial paint delay to get the page to render faster:

1. nglayout.initialpaint.delay : 0

Now, if any of these parameters don't exist, you'll have to create them. Simply right click and select the relevant parameter type, e.g. 'boolean' for a parameter that can have a true or false value, and 'integer' for a parameter that takes a numerical value. Much less common is 'string'.

Finally, I recommend this add-on:

Tweak Network

You'll see FasterFox in the search results too, but I don't really recommend it, since with the manual tweaks and Tweak Network you have it covered, and I thought it messed with FF3 a bit too much, seemingly making things worse on some occasions. Tweak Network also gives you some extra benefits when a page doesn't load, bringing up some diagnostic tools on the offending page. Try it out, it's pretty smart.