Tweaking Firefox.

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[Kyle]

I recently realized i never re tweaked Firefox after my latest hard drive. I thought while I was at it I would make a sticky on the forum about it.

Tweaking Firefox

Note:These tweaks should only on a computer with hardware made after year 2002, and a DSL or Cable Internet connection

Step 1.) Open up Mozilla Firefox. In the address bar type "about:config" without the quotes. You should see a page that looks like this:

Step 2.) In the filter bar type in "pipe" without the quotes. You should get three results.


Step 3.) A.) Right click on "network.http.pipelining" and click "Toggle" to change it from False to True.

B.) Right click on "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" and click on "Modify", then change the value to a number in between 20 and 50. You can try different numbers and see which works the best for your computer.

C.) Right click on "network.http.proxy.pipelining" and click on "Toggle" to change it from False, to True.

This is what it should look like when your done with A, B, and C of step 3.

Step 4.)  Next right click anywhere and go to "New > Integer" and type in "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" without the quotes for the name. For the value put in 0.

What did this all do?

Changing "network.http.pipelining" and "network.http.proxy.pipelining"to True allows pipelining to be used.
Changing "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to a high number, allows more things to be done at one time, thus increasing speed.
Adding the new integer "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" tells it to give 0 seconds of delay before it does anything with any instructions.

[G-Mon]

Good find, Kyle. I have a few more I'd like to share:

First, find your Firefox profile folder. On Windows systems, this'll be somewhere like %AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default (%AppData% is a system shortcut to the current user's Application Data folder, default stands for the profile name, and xxxxxxxx stands for a random string of 8 alphanumeric characters). Create a new text file named user.js in that folder and open it in your text editor of choice; Notepad'll do. Here're a few options from mine, all well-commented:

Code: [Select]

/* Force New Windows Restrictions
    0: Default - Divert *all* new windows to current tab/window or new tab
    1: Don't divert *any* windows spawned by JS
    2: Don't divert JS windows that include size/placement/toolbar info */
user_pref("browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction", 0);As this one says, this affects redirection of Javascript-spawned windows into tabs, and interacts with forcing new-window links into tabs. You can leave all JS windows alone, redirect them all, or just redirect ones without certain info. Defaults to 2.

Code: [Select]

// Put an end to blinking text!
  user_pref("browser.blink_allowed", false);Pretty self-explanatory. Controls blinking text; blinks if this is true, won't blink if it's false. Defaults to true.

Code: [Select]

// Change to normal Google search:
  user_pref("keyword.URL", "http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q=");Affects what happens when you enter search terms into the Address bar. You can change this to anything that includes a keyword in the URL; this changes to a normal Google search. Defaults to Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" search.


You can even turn on pipelining here:

Code: [Select]

// Enable pipelining:
  user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true);
  user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true);
  user_pref("network.http.pipelining.maxrequests", 8);
  user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 0); // optionalQuick aside: "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" controls how long Firefox waits for data before trying to render a page; this defaults to 250, which means 250 milliseconds (1/4 second). Settings this to 0 means that Fx will try to render right away (even without complete data); the page will finish rendering earlier on faster machines, but total rendering time will be higher, especially on slower machines.


You can do this with any item you see in about:config; the format is user_pref("about.config.item.name", value); The best part of this is you can copy this file into any other profiles you make, and not have to apply these tweaks manually again! If you add these while Firefox is running, you will have to close and restart it for these changes to take effect.

Got a bunch more, but those involve different files, and this post is long enough as it is (even without images, Kyle). Maybe next time.

[Kyle]

Setting nglayout.initialpaint.delay to 0 seems to go faster then 250 for me.

[G-Mon]

Well, the difference is less noticeable on faster machines. You're definitely going to notice a speed hit on, say, a PIII 500MHz and 256MB of RAM.

Anyway, got another user.js tweak.

Code: [Select]

/* Set the size of the back-Forward cache in pages.
   0 disables Back-Forward cache.
   -1 (default) allows Firefox to set it based on system RAM. */
user_pref('browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers", -1);This one changes the size of the so-called Back-Foward cache; starting with v1.5, Firefox caches some pre-rendered pages for return visits that session (say, the Back button). As you can probably guess, this drives up memory usage, which some people have been complaining about. As said in the commented code, setting it to 0 disables it entirely, and the default of -1 tells Fx to manage it (it'll set it based on system RAM, but never more than 8 pages). Any positive integer n tells Fx to keep n pages cached in any given session. Setting this higher will increase performance on repeat visits, but raise memory use. Lowering or disabling it will do the opposite. You'll have to experiment with it (after adding it to user.js, you can edit it in about:config).

[Kyle]

I swear it goes faster then slower on mine :/ Either way, I made my post more accerate then it was before anyways. From year 2002.

G-mon, Do you happen to know if it still keeps the pages cached if you close the browser? I'm curois ebcuase this could help my sisters comptuer which runs things to high end for her RAM :/

[G-Mon]

Disk cache yes, memory cache no. I assume the Back-Forward cache is in memory, so that'll disappear from session to session. Like I kinda said in the post, BF cache is a trade-off between performance and memory usage. If you're going to set it manually, be careful about setting it too high, or memory usage'll go up very quickly. Just FYI, here's some more info on the BF cache.

And now that I look over where I got the info on "nglayout.initialpaint.delay", it'll start and finish sooner when set to 0 on higher-end machines, but the amount of time from start to finish will be longer. I'll edit my post to reflect this.

[Bobo]

Why can that only be used on hardware newer than 2002?

[Kyle]

It can be used with older hardware, but If you try to run mozzila firefox in the first place with old hardware it will go slow, and then if you change it to do 30 requests at once instead of 3 It will prabally take longer then just doing 3 at a time, because it will get "clogged".

I prabally actully did that a little to high, honestly i changed it to 2002 because thats after the P3 in G-mons post, which I prabaally shouldn't have, anything that would be "new" at 2000 should be fine also.

[Bobo]

Well I have a pIII 1GHz, 128MB RAM.  Would that be OK?

[G-Mon]

Probably, but I'd look out for high memory usage.

Also, I've been reading up on some about:config preferences, and ran into something interesting about network.http.pipelining.maxrequests:

Values greater than 8 are assumed to be 8; values less than 1 are assumed to be 1.

(From MozillaZine KB: about:config entries)

In other words, anything above 8 doesn't make sense for this. Also, from this pref's own page: "Higher values will cause a delay before the first request completes but will make the last request complete sooner. Higher values will also cause more of a delay if a connection fails."

[Wolfhound]

I did all this and now firefox runs like 100 times ............. slower!

[Kyle]

Try deleting "nglayout.initialpaint.delay", wha g-mon was saying may be true in your case. The rest i cant even see much of a possibily of it making it slower unles syou somehow did somethign wrong.

[Wolfhound]

Try deleting "nglayout.initialpaint.delay", wha g-mon was saying may be true in your case. The rest i cant even see much of a possibily of it making it slower unles syou somehow did somethign wrong.

thanks kyle I got it running smoothly by resetting "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and now its working great really fast!

[adamcromack]

I also have the fasterfox plugin, which does a lot of this, and more, to speed up firefox a lot - it's actually quite noticable how much it improves it's performance.. https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1269/

[Motoxrdude]

Does anyone know if this will work on a mac?
We have some macs at school, G3s, and it is SLOOOOOOW.