speed up firefox

posted Dec 26th 2004 11:50am by
filed under: misc hacks

speed up firefox

forevergeek.com has a useful guide on speeding up firefox for broadband users. basically after getting to the hidden config settings you set the browser to request more data that it usually does.

1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

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

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

If you’re using a broadband connection you’ll load pages MUCH faster now!



137 Responses to speed up firefox

  • natural born hacker says:

    Sweet, it does speed up firefox a good deal, thx, and keep up the good work.

  • shaund says:

    Oh yea! Much faster! nice job

  • Yeah, you’ll also start raping the servers…

  • Da'Frogg says:

    Works with Mozilla as well as Firefox. Great tweaks!

  • I think I’m in love. Reminds me of using my cable modem many years ago.

    PS: Is “Hack a Day” male or female?

  • Rob says:

    …some sites will ban you for doing this. You are basically making about a million connectiong to a server which will eventually make it crash.

    Yeah, but whatever. Have fun.

  • Mighty Pete says:

    Good Hack !
    Setting “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests”

    to 15 works just fine BTW and would be a little easier on the servers.

  • Groxx says:

    Woah. Outstanding! I LOVE IT!!!
    Yet another reason to use Firefox over IE :)

    Now. I’ve got some SERIOUS surfing to do…

  • scott says:

    Wonder if there is anything similiar for Safari. Would be nice to have a good strong connection for once.

  • matt says:

    Just an FYI, Internet Explorer actually already does this. However, i believe it does only 4 by default. There are tons of hacks for IE that explain how to increase the number of files you can download from 4 to xx.

    Dont get me wrong though, im frefox all the way… Just thought I would bring in a little bit of clarity :)

  • Joost Schuur says:

    There’s some comments here by one of the Mozilla members on why this is not such a good idea:

    http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/007164.html

  • Pedro says:

    very cool… thanks very much!!

  • michael Martin says:

    Sweet.. I need this for omniweb!

  • docca says:

    excuse me, but there’s an extension that does this (and more) that’s been out for quite a while… it’s called “Tweak Network Settings” and can be installed from your Extensions menu.

  • Alan says:

    So how does one remove an item? I added the “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” but wish to remove it but there is no obvious way to do so.

  • d1663m says:

    4 ought to be plenty for maxrequests. If the server is doing its job and keep-alive is working all around, four connections ought to get you what you need without killing a server with TCP connection set-up and break-down.

  • fdisk says:

    Alan – right click on nglayout.initialpaint.delay and choose reset. That will clear out the integer and basically make that key dormant.

  • Matt says:

    This is totally against RFCs… The web RFCs state that you can only request 2 pages/links/downloads at a time. Anything more then that and it’s against RFCs and may get you banned from some websites!

  • Copertop says:

    This is a good hack but it will rape servers… AND when i did it tomy firefox… for some reason all my bookmarks stopped working… i can’t import any and none show up. It messed with my sage bookmarks too for RSS… any one wanna help? email me at jofd@techie.com

  • DAVIDLI says:

    He’s right, IT’S REALLY BAD FOR WEBSERVERS

    I mean, look suppose you set it to 10 connections at a time. Now you will have 9 connections more whenever you browse. I mean, if you browse 3 windows at a time, you connection just get’s hit with 27 more connections.

    But if you are the server and you get let’s say about 20 hit’s per minute. Then that would be 20*9=180 more connections. This is why servers sometimes limit connections to a maximum of 2 per ip. So I all want to say is: sux2u

  • jason says:

    it didetn speed up any thing for me

  • jd says:

    This seems not to be possible to do with portable firefox… if I am correct… Anyone?

  • Chad cloman says:

    The default value for the rendering delay (nglayout.initialpaint.delay) is only a quarter of a second, and setting it to zero can actually slow things down because the browser may have to undo work that it already did. See the following page for details:

    http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips#oth_rendering

  • nickbird says:

    nifty but i feel guilty now because instead of just poking the server with a stick im poking the server with like a hundred sticks and then throwing rocks at them and whipping them yelling “FASTER FASTER!” but hey

  • why? says:

    Well, first of all this doesn’t work. And by doesn’t work I mean it actually slows Firefox down considerably. Second of all, anyone who says it does work would probably also be cured of any aches and pains by ingesting a placebo tablet. Thirdly, bombarding web servers is just plain stupid. What’s the point of a fast browser if the entire internet has slowed down due to being flooded by too many browser requests? Firefox is a good product… leave it alone.

  • Jeff Cunningham says:

    Very cool. Now if I could just find a hack for Firefox that would cause it to use the readline/Emacs key combinations in the edit URL box like Mozilla does, instead of Windows key combinations, I’d be REALLY happy. (like C-d to delete forward, C-k to delete to end of line, C-a to go to beginning of line, etc).

    -Jeff

  • Jeff Cunningham says:

    After reading the Mozilla notes on nglayout.initialpaint.delay I set mine in Firefox back to the default 250. And it is definitely faster, so the people above who aren’t noticing a speed increase must have some other bottleneck than their browser.

    By the way – it also works in Mozilla (same engine).

    -Jeff

  • ryan says:

    I accidently crashed my friends site with this…

  • Dr. apocalypse says:

    after changing my settings i am unable to return to “about:blank”. i’ve done this on two identical computers and the same thing happened on each one. any suggestions?

  • karmic surfer says:

    works as described. as for bombing servers with requests, is this a modern version of Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons”- a social trap in which a few can benefit by selfishness but the whole thing collapses when everyone follows the same selfish logic? Stay tuned…

  • robuc1 says:

    well, i followed your directions, but you lost me at “right click anywhere”. i have a powerbook g4 1.5 ghz, no right clicker and no way to find a “new integer” :(

  • andy says:

    i just used this for OSX. and when i hide ff it and reloud it later it white and if i drag the mouse over it the picture comes back half the time. im not sure these are related. but it sure seems that way. it works great besides this. anyone else have these problems?

  • andy says:

    update on my last post. it seems that it only does this if i have the tabs button open. and even though i use thunderbird but i was at aol and it happened without using hide button. i exited tabs and tried again. almost no whiteness. but there was still some. email me at fleebailey33@yahoo.com if u got any help

  • andy says:

    the person who posted before me must not be familiar with OSX. control click acts like right click. thought id add that

  • Nate says:

    Well, you would be raping servers… if Firefox didn’t limits the maxrequests to 8. Setting it higher doesn’t do diddly.

    There’s actually a lot more of those hidden settings, as well as some settings to speed up rendering (such as not bothering with the “broken image” icon on image load).

    Another way to do the same thing:

    Go to your profile directory (C:Docs and SettingsuserApp Data(hidden)MozillaFirefoxprofilerandomcrap)
    there should be a file there, prefs.js
    New text file “user.js”
    edit it.
    format is

    user_pref(“Pref.name.here”, value);

    value can be true, false, a number, or a string in quotes.

    This is the one I use: http://www.funygroup.org/user.js . Play around with it. Just copy it to that path, open it in notepad to edit.

  • ymm says:

    Hahaha. You guys have all been OWNED.

  • flamesbeneath says:

    Although this does do the “server rape”, it’s still fun to mess around and see how fast it’ll screw a server or screw your connection. I’ve got the saddest wi-fi connection, and if too much data is sent too fast it’ll disconnect. I’ve been messing around to see which setting is the max for my crap-nection to the net. It does pass time…

  • iceman says:

    awesome, works a charm…just want to know what nglayout.initialpaint.delay actually does!!

  • iceman says:

    This is wicked! its speeds up browsing loads…just wanted to know what the nglayout.initialpaint.delay actually does?!

  • iceman says:

    This is wicked! its speeds up browsing loads…just wanted to know what the nglayout.initialpaint.delay actually does?!

  • unkman says:

    this does cause you to constantly hammer sites you are trying to connect to.. this will one get you banned from sites with paranoid admins. also will decrease your speed with the amount of requests going out and if your speed is just slow get cable or dsl!

  • neut says:

    Hey, dont set nglayout.initialpaint.delay to Zero – it is possibly not interprated as precisely 0, but if it is or is or is too small a value – the ‘nglayout.initialpaint’ methods will thrash the CPU’s attention as data trickles in.
    Set it to a value insignificant to the user like 50 -150 (milliseconds), but not insignificant to the CPU.
    When tweaking in general – try to hit the kneepoint in the changing returns, not flat extremes.
    In this case if a paint.delay value of 0 was interprated literaly, the paint thread/s would choke up cpu time for the entire duration of loading data.

  • Tim says:

    Hmm, it made my firefox really slow, if i jsut reset all the changed settings, will it be alright again?

  • Don says:

    The settings given above slowed my dsl connection down to a crawl.

    I set network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to 5 and I set nglayout.initialpaint.delay to 100. Now I am seeing a major speed increase.

    Thanks docca for the “Tweak Network Settings” extension info.

  • eh says:

    initial paint set to 100 i would guess is supose to make it longer….
    maxrequest set to 5, would set it just a litttleeee faster, since i believe default is 4

  • Trevor says:

    this slowed my connection down considerably

  • fixedgear says:

    Seems to be working great for me. Comcast cable, near Philly, PA.

  • fixedgear says:

    seems to be working fine here, thanks. comcast cable, near philly, pa.

  • Keith Doyle says:

    Are there any Firefox settings that will actually allow the STOP button to interrupt a page load? Isn’t that what STOP is supposed to be for?

    And boy, I’d sure like the “HOME” page and the “New Window” page be different– I NEVER want a new window to be “home”, either the current window or a blank would make more sense (IE does current window, which is most often what I’m wanting to do). I don’t suppose there’s a secret option for that…

    Checked out the Mozilla blog site responses to these hacks– they are so full of themselves– graphing the “phenomenal” increases in firefox downloads and all. And their page had a “comments” box which I had entered this stuff into first, but the thread is closed to comments which they don’t tell you until AFTER you type it in and hit “post”…

  • zako says:

    works very good thanks! this website is awesome

  • larryB says:

    Well done…thank you!!!

  • kman says:

    just set max connections to ’2,’ that way you won’t piss off the admins and it still speeds things up a bit.

  • sh4wn says:

    nice one. thx. great site to0

  • Cunjo says:

    I thougth firefox was fast already, but this is bleeding INSANE.

    Thanks for the info — this is one tip that was well and truly useful.

  • Tarran says:

    I got to say this works great.

    Agree with everyone that this makes firefox even better then IE ever was.

    Thanks for sharing it with us.

  • r4zz4 says:

    this made the pages load faster but slowed down images, i also was banned from a forum site ^_^

  • Odin says:

    Great job, it does work ! thank you.

  • jak says:

    this works for awhile but eventually the internet will start to slow down but at least in this hack it’s recomended alot lower than what i was recomeded a few monthes ago from another site i was told to put 400 in this was great at first then everything quickly slowed down

  • nguyen dung says:

    i want to hack speed MU ONLINE, teach me! plz.
    i hope receiving to reply from you, Thank you very much.

  • CaptSnuffy says:

    here’s another one, since no one even uses IPV6, just disable it for an amazing speed boost

    go to
    network.dns.disableIPv6
    and toggle it to true

  • CaptSnuffy says:

    here’s another one, since no one even uses IPV6, just disable it for an amazing speed boost

    go to
    network.dns.disableIPv6
    and toggle it to true

  • brandon says:

    i cant get it to change it to true

  • gronzie says:

    All i want is to have MozillaFirefox stop from downloading .jpg pix etc.two times to save them.Old netscape dosent need to download twice -once to view and once again to save them.
    Why is this new MozFire so great taking double time and i have cable ,its SLOW ! Also it requires you to clear the download history along with the task bar Two more things to do, and if you do many pix too fast it fails totally? This is BETTER -I dont Think So !

  • amie says:

    How to hack speed, hack hit and dupe on MUonline? I really wanna know, pls.

  • Wind says:

    use prefetch if you are using windows xp to speed up running time more faster too.

  • matto says:

    wow, thanks it’s working faster for me! I hope to see some more of this from you guys!

  • Corin says:

    Is there:
    a.) an equivilent to about:config for IE?
    b.) a way of speeding up IE

    thanks

    corincole [at] gmail [dot] come

  • yoshima says:

    i wanna know who got one hit hack and dupe hack for MUONLINE? please sent to me i need those hack……………………….

  • madoka says:

    how to do config

  • sw3ng says:

    Brilliant!!! That was a major different! Thanks!

  • michel says:

    me mande speed hack para muonline por favor

  • Ravi says:

    Really cool!!
    What a pity, I use mozilla for my surfing and am fully satisfied with its performance. Maybe I should download firefox and give it a spin just to try out the ideas thrown around in this article.

    http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com

  • Erick says:

    i wanna know who got or how to get one hit hack and dupe hack for MU ONLINE? please sent to me i need those hack….

  • Dan says:

    It does work! I tested it on sites that always load slowly and with these tweeks they load in under a sec. Secondly if a server can’t handle requsets like this then what we are doing is actually advancing technology, just because something is good doesn’t mean we should leave it alone! It means the oposite, we should push servers to support more connections and thus creating a faster internet overall, not a slower one. And I doubt that a website will block you because of how many connections your ip addy has on their server, let’s say i am a multimillionire, i have 50 comps in my house and we all want to see the victoria secret model show and I can’t because we all share the same IP (we’re networked) thats BS, I’ll believe it when it happens. the guy from mozillizine even said that it is a person/system dependent change, if it works for you great, no harm no foul, never mentioned a real down side, besides some sites looking “broken”. So all you nay-sayers just get lost, go make stuff up some where else, might i ssuggest a forum, where you can read a question the responde with “n00b”, i know you do it.

  • moises says:

    aew man keria saber como hackear uma conta MENSSEGER i uma conta GUNBOUND assim q resolverem me informarem mandem-me um e-mail flws galera fui>>>>>>>..<<<<<<<<<<

  • ruthlessjack says:

    nothing really changed thta i could see noticably – although maybe i’ll look at it for a while longer and see if it makes a change – ?

  • ann says:

    Thank you for sharing this good sites to me .I will often go through it.

  • Legacy says:

    Here’s another Firefox speed tip: I think the weakest link or slowest point with Firefox that I have noticed on my machine, even after tweaking the values is when it says, “looking up (the site name) at the lower left corner of the screen. It doesn’t always happen though. A way that I resolve this and help FF go faster by skipping a step is to lookup the IP address myself on the sites I visit frequently and bookmarking them as the IP address instead of the domain name.

    For example: Lets say I check out MSN.com out frequently and have it bookmarked. First I find out the IP address by going to start->Run->Cmd->enter and then simply ping http://www.msn.com . That tells me the IP address. Plug that IP into your browser then resave the bookmark. Voila, you have cut a step out of the process. Granted this will not work for every site and the speed up might be negligble but if you are reading this forum, you are interested in millisecond speed diffrences.
    You can also add all the stuff after the IP if needed like http://64.233.167.104/firefox?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official
    instead of
    http://www.google.com/firefox?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official
    Am I off base here or is this speeding things up slightly?

  • misterviet says:

    HOLY CRAPOS ITS awsome now. its fast!

  • cynicx says:

    You can goto the https://addons.mozilla.org/ and download the extension which will do this “hack” for you. It will let you adjust everything from a nice little window

  • LuCIFER says:

    can you give me some hacks for MUONLINE pls…
    i would be very gratefull
    baditoiuvalentin@yahoo.com send thro mail :D

  • heaton moor says:

    This worked a treat for me. Thanks.

  • Reon says:

    But be sure that you are not sending more pings to the server, as your ip can be banned. You may use some ip blocker software for this. But hey dont become a COWBOY ok..that I only want to say.

  • gabe says:

    But where to find those softwares. If you have any resource for them then please put a link over here, or tell me the site where i can get that softwares.

  • gabe says:

    But where to find those softwares. If you have any resource for them then please put a link over here, or tell me the site where i can get that softwares.

  • gabe says:

    But where to find those softwares. If you have any resource for them then please put a link over here, or tell me the site where i can get that softwares.

  • skal tura says:

    Bad for the server?

    Well, as a sysadmin i’d say, yes it gives some seemingly extra load, and yes opening & closing connections takes a bit of CPU time, but with modern hardware, it’s so insignificant computational power spent for opening sockets that do i care?
    Besides, there are settings at server side to limit the connections, normally there is always extra threads/childs (depends upon do you have a current kernel version, and which OS) that there won’t be time spent for that.

    Along with that: I couldn’t care less if it spends a little more server CPU time, even as a sysadmin, as long as it makes users happier & more comfortable :)

  • ahiran says:

    Hey can any one tell me how to change the ip address. I use many proxy ip but they are easily caught by the servers. I am really very confused.

  • lefriwi says:

    Nice. Firefox is alot faster, even on my older machine. Cheers.

  • bandiits says:

    I want to get 1 hit kill hack for muonline. where can I get it from???

  • sorin says:

    Heloo

    Please tell me if there is a hack for Muonline Global theat realy works.
    If there is a hack tell me were can i get it end how to use’it. Merci!!!!!!!!!

  • cool_vip says:

    I’m confused with allo the post but i surely support that there shld not be much load on servers. Why we become selfish and request more and don’t let other to connect to servers.

    thats right..What is use of a fast browser when we have network all choked up..??

    Well RFC restrict connection to 2 , thats why many times we are not able to connect to servers when pipelining.maxrequest set to 30 or more..

    Be wise and let the maxrequest to 4..

    firefox people have done research on their products and they know what is best for the connection.

  • john karn says:

    Amazing ….have you a similar hack for opera?

  • sweetweeks says:

    That was my first tweek of Firefox(!)very cool.And it does work.I did lower the request rate though in consideration of what was posted about choking the server. It’s nice to have more speed but let’s not get too greedy and blow it for us all.

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