The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Last year (was it really last year? btw Happy New Year everybody, I know I’m a little slow on the uptake ;> Raise your hand if you’ll also write ‘04 on your checks until June.) we posted some Firefox builds that are optimized for G4 and G5 processors. There’s another way of speeding up Firefox that doesn’t involve downloading anything, by tweaking the default browser settings. I can’t take credit for this hack but I am going to reprint it here because the original has some confusing typos. Also please note that all such voodoo is highly unsupported and could damage your hearing and default your mortgage and blah blah blah so use with caution, k?

• 
  
• Hit “Control+T” to open a new tab.
• Type “about:config” and hit enter.
• Scroll down to where it says network.http.pipelining
• Double click to change this value to true.
• One below this you should see network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
• Double click this box and change the 4 to 8 [ed.: some sources suggest 30 or 100 instead of 8, which may conceivably seriously tax some web servers… do what you will and may god have mercy on your soul, speed demons].
• Scroll down to where it says network.http.request.max-start-delay (makes the page start to render as soon as your browser starts recieving information)
• Double click and change the value 10 to 0.
• FireFox should now run much faster.

Have been testing this out for a few hours now and I’m not totally blown away, but it does seem at least incrementally faster, especially with lots of tabs and windows open. Also my downlink is sloooooow today so YMMV. Let us know if this hack works for you, if you don’t notice a change, or if it fried your car’s starter motor and posted naked pictures of you on the internet. Unless it’s the former, we divest ourselves of all responsibility. :)