RealTechNews.com - Independent Tech

Thursday, January 06, 2005

More on Speed-Boosting FireFox
For those of you who don't know, Bill and I write a tech column every other week for PC Mag Online. It's called Alice and Bill's Tech Edge. Anyway, this week we are looking at the topic I covered here on how to boost FireFox and Mozilla browser performance through the roof with a simple 2 minute code tweak.

The debate though, involves whether tweaking causes an unnatural and unfair server load on the sites you visit. Some say yes, but as part of the research in writing the column I found just as many that say no. They claim that enabling pipelining is not the same thing as opening 30 simultaneous web sessions (as the tweak seems to ask for) and that most developers simply stopped writing for pipelined browsers after broadband took off, which is why they are shipped with pipelining turned off. Too much code can break.

So...the question of the day is: is pipelining bad or good? Please read the column for more detail (the FireFox section is on the second page) and then lets us know what you think here and on the PC Mag discussion board.

# Permalink Posted at 11:22 AM 3 comments Email this Link

Comments on this Item:

From http://www.mozillazine.org/

Speed up load time
• Firefox is slow to load initially on Windows XP. You can speed this up a bit by using XP's built in prefetcher. Simply right-click on the Firefox icon you use to start the browser. Add the text /Prefetch:1 to the end of the line in the target field.

The whole line should look something like the following:
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" /Prefetch:1

I was skeptical at first but I do notice a positive difference in FF's time to load.

# posted by Earle 7:02 PM

Well...Tried the boost at 5. "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests 5"

Worked very good. BUT the sites that are normally slow to respond were still slow to respond.

bumped it up to 8.

my favorite slow to respond site never responded. I feel it is a private server. Some guy in England I think.

But with DSL I didn't see a performance boost from 5 to 8.

So in summery: Slow sites are still slow, fast sites are just as fast from 5 as they are at 8.

Any fixes to speed windows up?;)

# posted by JD 6:11 AM

This is incredible! Wasn't sold on Firefox (just a creature of habit) UNTIL NOW!!!!! This baby flies.

# posted by RobertSB 6:22 PM

Post a Comment