How to Make Firefox Load Pages Faster

Mozilla Firefox is the best web browser on the web currently, with the largest user base in the world. Though it's facing competition from new web browsers like Google Chrome, it has still managed to stay ahead in popularity. There are ways to make this browser work faster, than it already is. Making a few 'under-the-hood' changes in the browser's settings can really make it load pages quickly and even accelerate downloads.

Just like fine tuning a car engine makes it run faster, changing some under-the-hood settings can make a web browser like Mozilla Firefox, work efficiently. To make it start quickly, set its priority to 'high', through the task manager.

You might know about clearing history and other basic stuff, but what I will now show you, is going to change its working at a deeper level. Here are some tweaks that can reduce web page loading time and accelerate download speeds.

A web page loads after the browser has sent a request to the server that hosts it. Normally any browser, including Firefox, waits for a considerable time before it sends another request for a web page, if the answer to a previous one is delayed.

This delays the loading time of web pages. If a feature called 'pipelining' is enabled, the browser sends multiple requests to the server and increases the chances of the pages getting quickly loaded. To enable pipelining, do the following. Type 'about:config', (without single quotes) in the web browser and press enter. A message will pop up, warning you of system instability, if changes in settings are made through the 'about:config' function. Don't worry about it and just click ok.

You will see a list of settings in front of you. Type 'Ctrl + F' and locate the following settings: 'network.http.pipelining' and 'network.http.proxy.pipelining'. Double click on both and set their boolean values to 'True'. Next, locate 'network.http.pipelining.maxrequests' and set its value to 8 by double clicking on it. In most cases, enabling pipelining decreases loading time.

To reduce the rendering time of web pages, there is a change that you can make in the 'content notify interval', which is normally set to 0.12 second. This is the interval after which the browser updates whatever new data it has received from a web site. This may delay the web page rendering due to frequent updating. If the content notify interval is made longer than usual, rendering will become faster. Here is what you will need to do.

Again type 'about:config' in the address bar and right click to create a new integer variable. Name it as 'content.notify.interval' and set it's value to be 500000. Since these values are in microseconds, you are changing the interval to 0.5 seconds effectively. Then, again right click on the page, to create a boolean variable named 'content.notify.ontimer' and set its value to 'true'.

Flash animations of advertisements can greatly delay the loading of a web page. To make Firefox work efficiently, you can install an extension tool called Flashblock, that can block out the loading of flash animations by default and gives you the option of loading only those flash applets, that you find useful.

Another hack that can improve performance is tweaking the content switch threshold loading time. Type 'about:config' in the address bar again and right click to create an integer variable named 'content.switch.threshold' and set its value to 250000 and you are done. After a quarter of a second, the browser will go into a low frequency interrupt mode, in which it gives top priority to page loading.

Firefox, like any web browser, stores certain pages in its cache while browsing. Once those pages are stored, it can load them quickly next time. To increase cache size, again go through 'about:config' and create a new integer variable by right clicking and name it 'browser.cache.memory.capacity' and set the value to '65536'. On restarting your browser, the larger cache will make it work faster.

Other than this, refrain from adding unnecessary add-ons and themes, as they can delay page loading. Keep the browser as lightweight, as possible.

If these tweaks do not work, you always have the option of reverting back to default settings. Implementing these techniques will definitely help speed up your work online. These minor changes in the Firefox settings will definitely help in reducing loading delay. Ultimately of course, greater Internet bandwidth will definitely make your browser run at lightning speed. There is no substitute for that.