Speeding up Firefox | Hacker News Reader

Speeding up Firefox

ubuntugeek.com

14 pointsdangoldin12 comments

Open articleView on HN

Pipelining and increasing max requests is considered harmful. Please do not enable these.

Both Mozilla and WebKit discourage this and for good reason.

What is the good reason?

See:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/http/pipelining-faq.h...

This obviously has the potential to introduce a new category of evangelism bugs, since no other popular web browsers implement pipelining.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Firefox-pipelining-speed-tweak-may-a...

URL says it all.

The second article notes that for most modern webservers for those not using a modem (really, they still have those?) it should be faster.

And this: "Firefox will only send a maximum of 8 HTTP requests at a time in any case" - really? Anyone know if there is a good reason?

Because most people don't want each client making >8 connections to their web server at once. Nor would making more connections necessarily be faster.

The second article notes that for most modern webservers for those not using a modem (really, they still have those?) it should be faster.

Oh, yes indeed-y. I'm writing modem control code for a compact framework app right now.

The one biggest firefox speedup that linux users can get is by installing a Minefield nightly (Firefox 3). It's a night and day difference.

I tried it and didn't notice any difference. Just saying.

Download the latest 3.2a with TraceMonkey (Mozilla's answer to Chrome's V8 javascript engine) - it makes a world of difference.

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/lates...

Buried in a comment in the article is a mention of the FF extension Fasterfox which is nice: http://fasterfox.mozdev.org/

There's also swiftfox: http://getswiftfox.com/

There's also a nice Firefox plugin that you can use to make the pipelining changes. It's all here. http://tinyurl.com/dgenbf

Reply on news.ycombinator.com