For those of you who don’t already run Firefox as your primary web browser, you really should.  These days, most websites are formatted for both IE and Firefox, so you don’t run in to the compatibility issues that you did once upon a time, plus Firefox has major security enhancements over IE, as well as privacy controls that IE can’t touch.  And, if that’s not enough, Firefox is much better at memory management than IE, and I’m not going to even get into the stability issues of IE.

So, for those of you who don’t want to deal with spyware, viruses, malware, crashing, etc.  Go here -> www.getfirefox.com and download the latest version and enjoy the internet the way it was intended.

Ok, now that you all have Firefox, I want to go over some of the tweaks for Firefox that enhance it’s already superior performance.

1) The first one is crucial, really.  Firefox comes with ipv6 enabled out of the box.  This is all fine and great, except that the long awaited ipv6 transition is, well, still in transition, with no real end in sight.  So, until we finally transition to ipv6 and drop ipv4, there’s no reason to have this enabled.  So, in your address bar, type the following:

about:config

and when the warning pops up, click “I’ll be careful, I promise!”

Now, up in the “Filter” field at the top of your screen, type:

network.dns.disableIPv6

Under value, it probably says “False“.  Double click on this row and it will switch to “True“.  ipv6 is now disabled and you should immediately notice an increase in speed when opening web pages.

2) This next one will reduce the amount of RAM that Firefox uses for its cache feature.  In the “Filter” field, type:

browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers

Double click on that row and change it from -1 to 0.

3) Next we’re going to enable pipelining.  This is another huge performance enhancement.  In simple terms, rather than Firefox sending a single request and waiting for a response, it’s going to send 8 at a time.  Back country road vs. 8 lane highway.  Sooo…

In the “Filter” field, type”:

network.http.pipelining

This should show two separate settings, on the “network.http.pipelining” row, double click it so that it’s value is “True“.  Now, on the “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” row, double click and change the value, whatever it is, to “8” (8 is the maximum – Firefox cannot send more than 8 requests at once).

4) Now we’re going to increase how many simultaneous connections Firefox can have at one time.  In the “Filter” field, type:

network.http.max-connections

Double click on that setting and change it from 30 to, lets say, 1000.  If you’re running Windows, Windows will blow up long before Firefox ever comes anywhere near that many connections, but, setting it to that makes more sense than setting it to some lower arbitrary number.

You should also see a setting named:

network.http.max-connections-per-server

This one is rather self explanatory.. this sets how many connections Firefox will make to a web server to load data, with an absolute maximum across all of your tabs of whatever you set network.http.max-connections to.

Double click on this setting and change it to “15“.

5) The two above settings rely on two other settings to be tweaked.  In the “Filter” field, type:

network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server

Double click on this setting and change it to “15“.

The other setting that need to be changed is:

network.http.keep-alive

If this is already set to “True“, there’s no need to change it.  However, if it’s “False”, change it to “True”.

6) The last one that will really do anything performance wise is:

network.prefetch-next

This is probably set to “True”.  Change this to “False“.

Now, once you’ve made all of these changes, close Firefox and reopen it.  You should immediately notice a substantial increase in speed.  If you don’t, then it could be your DNS settings, internet connection, cache options, spyware, ram, or any number of other things.  But, if you have an overall healthy system, these tweaks make a huge difference.

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