Speeding Up Firefox

I’m not sure about those HTTP Pipelining settings, but the “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” is probably best not set to “0”. If I understand it correctly, the propose of this delay is rather than having the page jump all around as the HTML is download, it waits a fraction of a second until it has more of the HTML downloaded before it starts rendering.

It means a tiny delay before the rendering actually starts, but once it starts it will be smoother and more stable. Leaving this setting at the default can actually lead to a smoother-feeling browsing experience.

I’m pretty sure I’m faster now too. Thanks Peter.

The pipelining takes advantage of newer web servers’ ability to handle this feature. The disadvantage is that it might confuse a server running the (extremely) old httpd server software.

As for the initialpaint delay, I tend to prefer setting it to close to zero. It’s definitely part of the Microsoft school of UI design, but when the user sees that his or her computer is doing something right away it feels like the software is working faster. Hence the paramount importance of getting MS Office’s main screen up as quickly as possible, no matter how slow the rest of it is.

At any rate, the best way I’ve recently found to speed up my browsing is to install the Opera 8.0 Beta which I’m still playing with.

Hmmm.
Interestingly I don’t seem to have a “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” entry in about:config.

I also noticed(discovered) that you can’t use the built in search for this page.

Y’all are geeks!

Wow, I’m impressed. It IS faster! The page load does seem a bit herky-jerky, probably for the reason Steve suspects, i.e., nglayout.initialpaint.delay = 0. I don’t mind this, but just out of curiosity, what is the default value if I want to set it back? Also out of curiosity, would the cumulative effect of all Firefox users setting their maxrequests to 30 create a massive increase in network traffic? Could I launch a crude denial of service attack by setting this to 10000 and then hammering the Reload button?? Just wondering.

Much faster.

Well it was easy to do, it does seem faster. And being the type of person who likes instant gratification, seeing herky-jerky loading is much better than a blank screen which leads me to hit the RELOAD button or enter again a million times.

Rob L.: default is 0.5 seconds, but I can’t remember the unit that they use, it might be milliseconds, so 500.

That is interesting, Paul. I always suspect that the reason bank machines make that rattle when they process your instructions is to keep your brain comforted by believing something is happening.

Asa from the Mozilla Foundation explains why these options are not set like this by default.