In one of our previous blog entries we (like many blogs on the net) have suggested to tweak your Firefox to use HTTP pipelining. Well, it appears we were wrong.
The tweak worked fine with Firefox 2, but the moment we switched our machines to Firefox 3 everything just stopped. Not a single site would load completely. Some googling brought us to this page which explained it quite nicely.
In short: do set pipelining on, but DO NOT up it too much. Below is a correction to the previous Tip.
1. Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:
Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.
2. You can double click on an entry to alter it. Alter the entries as follows:
Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 3.
This means it will make 3 requests at once.
Test it - go to Google images and search for something, notice how images load, do many of them come up as empty frames? If so, you may need to reduce the number more. 1 effectively disables pipelining.
3. Right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.
There you go, now if you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages MUCH faster.
2008/12/08
