Firefox has been outperforming IE in every department for years, and version 3.5 is speedier than ever.
But tweak the right settings and you could make it faster still, more than doubling your speed in some
situations, all for about five minutes work and for the cost of precisely nothing at all. Here’s what you
need to do.

1. Enable pipelining

Browsers are normally very polite, sending a request to a server then waiting for a response before
continuing. Pipelining is a more aggressive technique that lets them send multiple requests before any
responses are received, often reducing page download times. To enable it, type about:config in the
address bar, double-click network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining so their values
are set to true, then double-click network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and set this to 8. Keep in mind
that some servers don’t support pipelining, though, and if you regularly visit a lot of these then the
tweak can actually reduce performance. Set network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining
to false again if you have any problems.

2. Render quickly

Large, complex web pages can take a while to download. Firefox doesn’t want to keep you waiting, so
by default will display what it’s received so far every 0.12 seconds (the “content notify interval”).
While this helps the browser feel snappy, frequent redraws increase the total page load time, so a
longer content notify interval will improve performance. Type about:config and press [Enter], then
right-click (Apple users ctrl-click) somewhere in the window and select New > Integer. Type
content.notify.interval as your preference name, click OK, enter 500000 (that’s five hundred thousand,
not fifty thousand) and click OK again. Right-click again in the window and select New > Boolean.
This time create a value called content.notify.ontimer and set it to True to finish the job.

3. Faster loading

If you haven’t moved your mouse or touched the keyboard for 0.75 seconds (the content switch
threshold) then Firefox enters a low frequency interrupt mode, which means its interface becomes less
responsive but your page loads more quickly. Reducing the content switch threshold can improve
performance, then, and it only takes a moment. Type about:config and press [Enter], right-click in the
window and select New > Integer. Type content .switch.threshold, click OK, enter 250000 (a quarter
of a second) and click OK to finish.

4. No interruptions

You can take the last step even further by telling Firefox to ignore user interface events altogether
until the current page has been downloaded. This is a little drastic as Firefox could remain
unresponsive for quite some time, but try this and see how it works for you. Type about:config, press
[Enter], right-click in the window and select New > Boolean. Type content.interrupt.parsing, click
OK, set the value to False and click OK.

5. Block Flash

Intrusive Flash animations are everywhere, popping up over the content you actually want to read and
slowing down your browsing. Fortunately there’s a very easy solution. Install the Flashblock extension
(flashblock.mozdev.org) and it’ll block all Flash applets from loading, so web pages will display much
more quickly. And if you discover some Flash content that isn’t entirely useless, just click its
placeholder to download and view the applet as normal.

6. Increase the cache size

As you browse the web so Firefox stores site images and scripts in a local memory cache, where they
can be speedily retrieved if you revisit the same page. If you have plenty of RAM (2 GB of more),
leave Firefox running all the time and regularly return to pages then you can improve performance by
increasing this cache size. Type about:config and press [Enter], then right-click anywhere in the
window and select New > Integer. Type browser.cache.memory.capacity, click OK, enter 65536 and
click OK, then restart your browser to get the new, larger cache.

7. Enable TraceMonkey

TraceMonkey is a new Firefox feature that converts slow Javascript into super-speedy x86 code, and
so lets it run some functions anything up to 20 times faster than the current version. It’s still buggy so
isn’t available in the regular Firefox download yet, but if you’re willing to risk the odd crash or two
then there’s an easy way to try it out. Install the latest nightly build
(ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/), launch it, type about:config in the address bar
and press Enter. Type JIT in the filter box, then double-click javascript.options.jit.chrome and
javascript.options.jit.content to change their values to true, and that’s it – you’re running the fastest
Firefox Javascript engine ever.

8. Compress data

If you’ve a slow internet connection then it may feel like you’ll never get Firefox to perform
properly, but that’s not necessarily true. Install toonel.net (toonel.net) and this clever Java
applet will re-route your web traffic through its own server, compressing it at the same time,
so there’s much less to download. And it can even compress JPEGs by allowing you to reduce
their quality. This all helps to cut your data transfer, useful if you’re on a limited 1 GB-permonth
account, and can at best double your browsing performance.