Firefox has been outperforming IE in every department for years, and version 3 is speedier than everBut tweak the right settings and you could make it faster still,here’s what you need to do.
1. Enable pipelining:
To enable it, type about:config in the address bar, double-click network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining so their values are set to true, then double-click network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and set this to 8.
2. Render quickly:
Type about:config and press [Enter], then right-click (Apple users ctrl-click) somewhere in the window and select New > Integer. Type content.notify.interval as your preference name, click OK, enter 500000 and click OK again.Right-click again in the window and select New > Boolean. This time create a value called content.notify.ontimer and set it to True to finish the job.
3. Faster loading:
Type about:config and press [Enter], right-click in the window and select New > Integer. Type content.switch.threshold, click OK, enter 250000 (a quarter of a second) and click OK to finish.
4. No interruptions:
Type about:config, press [Enter], right-click in the window and select New > Boolean. Type content.interrupt.parsing, click OK, set the value to False and click OK.
5. Increase the cache size:
Type about:config and press [Enter], then right-click anywhere in the window and select New > Integer. Type browser.cache.memory.capacity, click OK, enter 65536 and click OK, then restart your browser to get the new, larger cache.
6. Enable TraceMonkey:
Install the latest nightly build (ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/), launch it, type about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Type JIT in the filter box, then double-click javascript.options.jit.chrome and javascript.options.jit.content to change their values to true, and that’s it – you’re running the fastest Firefox Javascript engine ever.
7. Compress data:
Install toonel.net (toonel.net) and this clever Java applet will re-route your web traffic through its own server, compressing it at the same time, so there’s much less to download.
