Hacking Firefox: Speed Up Your Browser
This is an excerpt from the ExtremeTech book, Hacking Firefox: More Than 150 Hacks, Mods, and Customizations. This chapter shows you how to speed up page rendering, tune Firefox to your CPU, optimize memory and caching, and more.
Hack it, tweak it, and make it scream down the information highway. This chapter covers several of the much-touted hacks that you will find on the Internet, as well as some other less popular but very useful hacks. You will get the skinny on the what, how, and why of them. More important, you’ll see how to customize them to fit your current setup and situation. The primary method of hacking for this section is adjusting key hidden preferences.
Deviating from RFC Specs Warning: The following hacks may make your browser download faster than your eyes can handle. Okay, kidding aside, the following hacks have generated a lot of controversy because they break away from industry standards. Based on RFC specification numbers 2068, 2616, and others, the defined and recommended maximum number of simultaneous connections using HTTP/1.0 Internet protocol is four. For HTTP/1.1, the defined and recommended number is two.
These hacks bump this number up. They also increase the number of connections per server. If you are using dial-up access, these hacks will be marginally beneficial; they’re really geared more for DSL, cable, and corporate networks; customizing these settings is covered in the “Bandwidth and Processor-Specific Optimizations” section later in this chapter.
Note: RFC stands for Request for Comment. These specifications are published to create technology standards for communication protocols and other application implementations.
These RFC standards are in place to balance a web server’s performance under heavy traffic by providing a certain level of quality of service for all users. However, as many users have realized, leeching and improved download performance are necessary when cruising through the net or downloading large files. This, coupled with the fact that the RFC was originally published in 1997, really begs for some radical changes to be taken. So you deal with the problem directly by increasing the number of concurrent connections made to a server for a page request.
Note: A request is any communication from Firefox to a web server. Such requests include the call to download the page and each element that the page refers to (for example, graphics, JavaScript files, Cascading Style Sheets, and so on). Continued…
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