Speed Up Firefox, Increase and Optimize your Internet Connection

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 17 Feb 2009

The Mozilla Foundation developed Firefox browser is already pretty fast, but there are ways of ensuring that your browsing speed increases (and I am not talking about the Firefox keyboard shortcuts). If you do not want to speed up your Firefox but would like to get the most out of your internet connection, I present to you SG TCP Optimizer and SoftPerfect NetWorx.

The Firefox browser, which has now reached version 3.0.6, has been from the beginning designed with speed in mind; this is to say that the good people at the Mozilla Foundation were thinking of you, the user that does not want to wait a long time for a page to load. But if you take the time to tweak some of Firefox’s settings, you will notice a positive impact on its browsing speed - an estimated 10% to 40% increase.

Follow this simple step by step guide in order to increase your Firefox browser’s speed
1. In Firefox’s address bar type “about:config”. Since we are on the topic of about:config, you might want to be made aware of a handy add-on called gui:config.
2. Type in “network.http.pipelining” in the “Filter” tab. Double click it and set the value to “True”.
3. Type in “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” in the "Filter" tab-> double click -> set value to 10.
4. Right click -> New -> String -> name the new string “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” -> set value to 0.
What you’ve done here is instructed Firefox to accept more packets transfers, increased the maximum amount of packet requests to 10, and removed the display delay (which by default is set to 250 milliseconds). For the changes to take effect, you need only restart Firefox.

Now if you would like to increase and optimize your internet connection, you might consider using SG TCP Optimizer and SoftPerfect NetWorx. SG TCP Optimizer, which comes free of charge and does not require an installation (meaning that it is portable), provides a set of manual and automatic tools that will come in handy when you need to fix problems or optimize your internet connection. SoftPerfect NetWorx (which is also freeware) on the other hand helps with bandwidth assessment: bandwidth usage and internet speed evaluation.

If you would like to get SG TCP Optimizer, a download location is available here.
If you would like to get SoftPerfect NetWorx, a download location is available here.


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