Firefox Tip

Firefox, the opensource browser from Mozilla, is rapidly gaining market share from IE with a reputation for better security, tabbed browsing, pop-up blockers, small footprint, RSS integration and other features.

For Firefox users, Brad Feld posted a helpful set of configuration tips to improve Firefox's performance. See the below.

Go to the address bar in Firefox and type in "about:config"

Look for the following lines:

• network.http.pipelining = false
• network.http.pipelining.maxrequests = 4
• network.http.proxy.pipelining = false

Change them to (by click/double-click the line):

• network.http.pipelining = true
• network.http.pipelining.maxrequests = 30
• network.http.proxy.pipelining = true

This configures the browser to make 30 requests at once and not wait for a reply to the request before making another request

Then you need to create one new option:

• Right click anywhere on the page and select New-> Integer.
• Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay"
• Set its value to "0".

This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. You need to restart Firefox for this to be enabled. On sites that support pipelining (not all do) the results are dramatic.

Thanks Brad for passing on the tip.