4J

Firefox is such a powerful browser, yet most people are unaware of the multitude of possible tweaks you could do to enhance your working experience using Firefox.


Of course the easiest way to enhance Firefox is by installing some of the very exiting extensions available.

There is one other way to tweak your browser, and that is through the "about:config" page. To access these settings, simply enter "about:config" in your URL address bar and hit enter.

Resources:

• mozillaZine page going into a lot of detail on the various settings
• Linux Journal article giving a quicker overview of some of the top tweaks

To demonstrate the power of these settings, I will demonstrate a quick hack to make you browser download pages much faster, using a technique called "pipelining" which allows your browser to make multiple connections to the same site to download page content in parallel. I got this tip originally from forevergeek.com

The Tip

Before we start, please note that this tip is aimed toward broadband connections.

1. Type "about:config" in the address bar and hit enter
2. Search for: "network.http.pipelining", "network.http.proxy.pipelining" and "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests"
3. Set "network.http.pipelining" to true by right clicking on the text and click on "toggle"
4. Also set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to true
5. Now set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to something like 10, which means that with each page request Firefox will make 10 parallel requests to download the various graphics and other objects
6. Restart you browser

To find the optimal setting, experiment and increase the number to measure if pages load faster.

Enjoy the tweaking :)