How to Speed Up Firefox

Posted on June 26th, 2006 by bangbang023

This actually started as a thread on Neowin and I thought I would post it here for good keeping.

I’m sure many of you Firefox users love the browser, but wish it were a bit quicker in rendering web pages. I can actually help you out a bit with a few custom settings that should give you a noticeable improvement in the rendering speed. Here’s what to do:

  • IN WINDOWS XP: Go to ‘Start’ and choose ‘Run’. In the window that appears, copy and paste “%UserProfile%\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles” (without the quotes) and hit ‘OK’
  • OR IN WINDOWS VISTA: Click the start orb in the bottom left. In the ‘Start Search’ dialog, copy and paste “%UserProfile%\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles” (without the quotes) and press ‘Enter’
  • In the Explorer window that opens up, there should be one folder. Open that folder. It will have a random name, so I can’t say what it’s name will be.
  • DOWNLOAD THIS FILE (right click, save target as) and save it to your desktop
  • Select the newly created file on your desktop and cut and paste it into the other folder I had you open before
  • Restart Firefox

That’s it. Depending on your machine, you should get a small to fairly noticeable boost in performance in Firefox. If you know what you’re doing and just want to know the contents of the file, this is what’s in the custom user.js:

user_pref(”content.max.tokenizing.time”, 600000);
user_pref(”content.notify.backoffcount”, 5);
user_pref(”content.notify.interval”, 200000);
user_pref(”content.notify.ontimer”, true);
user_pref(”content.switch.threshold”, 200000);
user_pref(”content.interrupt.parsing”, true);
user_pref(”content.maxtextrun”, 8191);
user_pref(”nglayout.initialpaint.delay”, 250);
user_pref(”network.http.max-connections”, 32);
user_pref(”network.http.max-connections-per-server”, 8);
user_pref(”network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy”, 8);
user_pref(”network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server”, 4);
user_pref(”network.http.pipelining”, true);
user_pref(”network.http.pipelining.maxrequests”, 8);
user_pref(”network.http.proxy.pipelining”, true);

Enjoy

Filed under: General

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9 Responses to “How to Speed Up Firefox”

  1. Squible.net » Speed up your Firefox!, on July 6th, 2006 at 2:56 am Said:

    [...] Follow the instructions at bangbang023’s blog here and have fun with a speedy browser with no more laggy pages if you know what to do with the user.js file you can download it here enjoy! [...]

  2. Shaun, on July 6th, 2006 at 3:11 am Said:

    Hey i just thought i let you know you got a mension on my blog for this tweak thanks for this its great and works much better than Fasterfox my blog is squible.net drop by when you have time its not much yet just getting into blogging :D I’m also a member of neowin under the name Veer dont no if you know me :P

  3. arturogoga » Acelerando Firefox, sin necesidad de extensiones como FasterFox, on August 20th, 2006 at 2:02 pm Said:

    [...] Quieren acelerar Firefox? Pues el blog de bangbang023 tiene un muy buen tip de cómo hacerlo, sin necesidad de extensiones. Simplemente, con un javascript. [...]

  4. El Manza, on August 23rd, 2006 at 10:47 pm Said:

    I followed that path and I’ve noticed that I haven’t got those Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles folders. I browse with Firefox every single day, though . What could it be?

    Thanks.

  5. bangbang023, on August 23rd, 2006 at 11:12 pm Said:

    You may have an older profile. I don’t remember the old location exactly, but it should be something like “%UserProfile%\Application Data\Firefox\” or “%UserProfile%\Application Data\Firebird”

  6. El Manza, on August 25th, 2006 at 4:18 am Said:

    Microsoft is the one and only folder I’ve got inside my Application Data folder. Weird, huh?

  7. bangbang023, on August 25th, 2006 at 10:13 am Said:

    Very weird. Do a search for prefs.js. That file will be in your profile directory.

  8. Bryant, on November 16th, 2006 at 6:39 pm Said:

    Help me please…
    I just installed Firefox 2.0, and all of a sudden, my username/password isn't being inserted in the signon window (it always was before). I tried the usual suspects–I did not mistakenly tell FF not to remember the password for this site; and I also tried the remember password bookmarklet, but all to no avail–FF will not ask me to remember this password. What do I need to do to get around this?

  9. Xpression.v2 » Blog Archive » OpenSearch Added, on December 8th, 2006 at 1:44 pm Said:

    [...] To add Xpression to your available search engines, click the blue or orange section. In IE7, you will see the word “Xpression” with a star next to it in the menu. In Firefox, you’ll see a menu option clearly named “Add Xpression”. Click either of these and you can now search my site without having to go to the front page first. This should prove helpful every time you guys need to access those Firefox tweaks I posted long ago lol. [...]

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