How to Speed Up Firefox
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”, 100);
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
July 6, 2006 - 3:11 am
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
I’m also a member of neowin under the name Veer dont no if you know me 
August 23, 2006 - 10:47 pm
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.
August 23, 2006 - 11:12 pm
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\Firebirdâ€
August 25, 2006 - 4:18 am
Microsoft is the one and only folder I’ve got inside my Application Data folder. Weird, huh?
August 25, 2006 - 10:13 am
Very weird. Do a search for prefs.js. That file will be in your profile directory.
November 16, 2006 - 6:39 pm
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?