9 out of 10 monkeys believe they are not behind glass

I was disappointed when I upgraded to Firefox 3 and found that one of my favorite extensions was killed. FasterFox was one of those tweaks that really made a difference in browsing speeds.

Then I stumbled across this today.

Reduce the amount of RAM Firefox uses for its cache feature

1. Type “about:config” (no quotes) in the adress bar in the browser.
2. Find “browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer”
3. Set it’s value to “0“;(Zero)

Increase the Speed at Which Firefox loads pages

1. Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit Enter.
   (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 10.
• This means it will make 10 requests at once.
3. Lastly, right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0“;.(Zero)

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 faster now.

Optionally (for even faster web browsing) here are some more options for your about:config (you might have to create some of these).

1. network.dns.disableIPv6: set “false”
2. “content.notify.backoffcount”: set “5“; (Five)
3. “plugin.expose_full_path”: set “true”.
4. “ui.submenuDelay”: set “0; (zero)

This little hack will drop Firefox’s RAM usage down to 10 Mb when minimized:

1. Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.
2. Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
3. In the box that pops up enter “config.trim_on_minimize”. Press Enter.
4. Now select True and then press Enter.
5. Restart Firefox.