Broadband users can get a significant speed increase from Firefox just by changing a couple of settings.  Firefox is distributed with settings that will work with any machine or setup, but really anyone with a half-decent connection can make these changes and get a great speed increase, and here’s how you do it!

Inside the address bar type:

about:config

and then find:

network.http.pipelining

network.http.proxy.pipelining

and set them both to “true”.  This adjusts the pipelining settings.
Then find

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

and set it to 8, though you should feel free to play with this number a little and tweak it as you see fit – the article http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.pipelining.maxrequests suggests that 8 is easiliy sufficient.

Finally, right-click on any setting and select ‘new’ and then ‘integer’.   Set the name to “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” (you might want to copy & paste it) and set the value to “0″ (zero).  This removes the render delay.

And hey presto you should notice a sigificant speed increase from a simple optimization!

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Firefox 3 Easter Eggs

There are some moderately amusing Easter Eggs in Firefox 3.  Simply type one of the following into the address bar (no spaces or http) and you’ll get a message:

about:robots

about:mozilla

about:config

(ok, technically “about: config” isn’t an Easter Egg, but the title on the warning screen is relatively amusing!)

Enjoy!

You may also be interested in Firefox 3 Cheat Sheet : http://lesliefranke.com/files/reference/firefoxcheatsheet.html