Specialization is for Insects, Seth says

I have at various times edited the about:config sections of my Mozilla Firefox.  I’ve generally done so willy-nilly and simply followed any instructions I came upon at lifehacker or elsewhere.  These days I’m much more familiar with Mozilla’s documentation on about:config entries so I will use this post to document:

1.) What entries I am changing in about:config

2.) What these changes are really doing

Step one: find some existing documentation on speading up FF via about:config: Here’s one!

This recommends that I change the value network.http.pipelining .  But what does this do?  The Mozilla wiki’s documentation is pretty verbose on the subject:

In HTTP 1.1, multiple requests can be sent before any responses are received. This is known as pipelining . Pipelining reduces network load and can reduce page loading times over high-latency connections, but not all servers support it. Some servers may even behave incorrectly if they receive pipelined requests. If a proxy server is not configured, this preference controls whether to attempt to use pipelining.

Excellent!  I rarely use a proxy so I am going to go ahead and change this setting to true and start using pipelining.

The next suggestion is to allow 15 simultaneous pipelines to a given webserver instead of the default 4.  Networking.http.pipelining.maxrequests states that this can be any number from 1 to 8 inclusive.  Glad I checked this one!  I am going to give 4 a shot and up it if nothing breaks.  Also networking.http.pipelining.ssl will turn on pipelining for secure websites only, which avoids some common proxy problems.

The next article suggests editing Network.prefetch-next .  This starts downloading websites before you click on them.  This gives a great speed boost to browsing, but it eats ram.  I am running on less ram than I would like, and am liberal with my tabs, so I am going to disable this setting. (wish me luck!)

I don’t spell very well.  So I would like my spellchecker to be enabled for single word or line forms as well as longer text boxes.  This is the layout.spellcheckDefault setting, I set it on 2 for every form.

This article covers several speed tweaks now:

network.http.pipelining false to true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests 30 to 8
network.http.max-connections 30 to 96
network.http.max-connections-per-server 15 to 32
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server 6 to 8
network.http.pipelining.ssl false to true
network.http.proxy.pipelining false to true

Some of these are kind of bizarre.  The maxrequests uses the correct number (8), but thinks that it was set to 30 previously.  These instructions also set pipelining on, and then turn it on again for ssl connections, which isn’t necessary.  Network.http.max-connections seems to do exactly what it sounds like and enables you to have more active connections downloading at once.

Next on my list is browser.sessionstore.max_tabs_undo.  This is the undo closed tab feature.  I've never needed to unclose more than 3 previous tabs.  I am going to set this to 5.  I hope that this will save some ram and I pray 'that god send me no need of thee'.

Browser.urlbar.autoFIll is the next issue I want to fix.  Firefox 2.0 filled in URL’s as I type.  FF 3 doesn’t.  I’ve had two people in my office harrass me about this lack of feature in FF3.0.  Set this value to true and see the glory days of FF2.0 return!

Well that’s all for me tonight, I’m glad that I documented these and I hope that someone else gets some use out of them.