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By default Firefox only opens one connection at a time when loading a web page.

On fast broadband connections this isn’t usually too much of a problem but should your speed drop at busy times, or if pages seems to load slowly there’s a great little tweak you can implement called “Pipelining”.

It’s also beneficial to fast connections as speed increases can still be seen.

Once ‘pipelining’ is set-up Firefox, will (by default) open many connections simultaneously to the website and retrieve the all the page’s elements in one go. Even on my fast broadband connection this has made a huge difference to my browsing page load times.

To enable Pipelining follow the simple steps below (it looks harder than it really is, in fact it’s fairly simple):

1. In the Firefox address bar enter: about:config and press return/enter
   This displays the internal configuration and system settings of Firefox
2. If prompted, accept the warning message that cautions against modifying the system settings:

   

3. In the filter/search field enter: network.http
4. This restricts the list to the entries for the HTTP protocol

5. Locate the entry: network.http.pipelining
   Normally this will be set to: false
   Double click on the entry to change the value to: true
   This enables “pipelining”
6. Locate the entry: network.http.proxy.pipelining
   Normally this will be set to: false
   Double click on the entry to change the value to: true
   This enables proxy “pipelining”
7. Locate the entry: network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
   Normally this will be set to: 1
   Double click on the entry and enter a value. 30 produces good results and strikes a nice balance between speed and loading overheads.
   The image below shows the network.http screen, the changes have been made and can be seen in bold:
   

   

8. Close all firefox windows/quit firefox to ensure the application is fully shutdown.

On restarting Firefox you should notice (hopefully) a considerable improvement on the time it takes pages to load. On most sites I have seen blazingly fast page loads.

Disclaimer: Your mileage may vary depending on your processor speeds, your bandwidth, the speed of your provider, the wind direction and the website in question. If you find that this change causes problems then reverse the procedure and you should be back to your original set-up.

Finally, all changes are, of course, made at your own risk (although it’d be pretty difficult to screw-up the changes needed).

If this tip helps, and improves your browser’s page load times then please leave me some feedback and link to this page, or refer friends to this article.

Happy faster browsing!

Richard

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 5:52 pm and is filed under browers, firefox, how-to, pipelining, support, tech, tip, tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.