Yesterday’s post led to several Firefox vs. Opera vs. IE discussions today, and one of the topics that came up was Opera’s total domination of the other two with respect to speed. While poking around a little, I found a few tweaks listed on a bunch of forums and sites that bring Firefox’s speed easily on par with Opera.

Before you start, load a page in a new tab and count how long it takes to load. This will be a loose benchmark to gauge these tweaks. For me, a good starting point was a link that took about 3 seconds to open.
Now type about:config in your address bar.

Set the following by right clicking the entries and selecting “toggle” or “modify”:
network.http.pipelining = true
network.http.proxy.pipelining = true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests = 8

Now, right-click a blank spot on the page, select New/Integer, and type nglayout.initialpaint.delay. Set the value of this new item to 0.

And that’s it. Load the original benchmark page in a new tab. For me, the second page load was virtually instantaneous.

For a complete reference on the about:config page, see MozillaZine’s about:config page

(Unrelated Note: You may have noticed that after your Firefox 5.01 upgrade, your Spellbound spell checker no longer works. Uninstall the old Spellbound extension and Install the SpellBound Development Version. That’s the only solution that I have found so far, which will also grace you with the added benefit of inline spell checking.)

Posted in Geeky