GregHowley.com

Thoughts on Firefox

February 5, 2005 -

I'm constantly finding new things in Firefox. Just yesterday, I removed the Firefox search options I never used - the defaults such as Yahoo! and Creative Commons, and I added searches for things I would use, such as IMDB, Wikipedia, and a php.net function search. Very nice.

Also, via my uncle Tim, this method that improves broadband page load speeds quite a lot.

1.Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return.

Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests


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 speeds up page loading.

2. 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 30. (This means it will make 30 requests at once.)

3. Lastly 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. If you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages much faster now.

Thanks to:

Sunbelt Software
101 N Garden Ave
Clearwater, FL 33755
USA

One complaint I've got though - every so often a page will open in a new window (probably due to target="_new" or something) and within that toolbar-less, tab-less window, multiple tabs will open. At that point, there's no way to switch tabs. It's especially annoying when a blank tab window opens on top. Oh well - maybe I'll find an extension somewhere that will disable tabs in popup windows.