Firefox is a great browser. It is the first to give Internet Explorer a run for its money. According to W3Schools, Firefox has over 40 percent of the browser market. This is due in part to its usability, flexibility and speed. Although Firefox is a fast browser there are ways to make it even faster. We will show you several ways to maximize Firefox’s performance.
Disable History Cache
Every time you visit a page Firefox saves the page so when you press the back button the page will display right away. To disable this type “about:config” in the address bar. Do a search for browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers. Double-click on browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers and change the -1 to 0. Remember that this will slow down how fast pages come up when you press the back button.
Only Keep the Extensions You Need
When you have a lot of extensions in Firefox your computer needs to load the extensions to memory for when needed. The fore extensions you have, the more Firefox becomes. Go to Tools the Add-ons. Remove the extensions that you are not using. There is a possibility that one extension is causing the problem. To see if this is the case, start Firefox in safe mode. Go to the run command in Windows and type “firefox.exe -safe-mode”. Once you click on OK, Firefox will start without skins or extensions.
Change the Number of Connections
The more connections you have going out for information the faster the page will load. To increase the amount of connections Firefox uses type “about:config” in the address bar. Find and change the following:
- content.interrupt.parsing – true
- content.max.tokenizing.time – 2250000
- content.notify.interval – 750000
- content.notify.ontimer – true
- content.switch.threshold – 750000
- nglayout.initialpaint.delay – 0
- network.http.max-connections – 48
- network.http.max-connections-per-server – 16
- network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy – 16
- network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server – 8
- browser.cache.memory.capacity – 65536
When done restart Firefox and check out the difference.
That’s it for this one. With these three tips, Firefox should lean and built for speed. There is a lot more you can do to tweak Firefox. These are a few of the big ones.
