Enable HTTP Pipelining to Increase Firefox Speed

If your Firefox browser is too slow especially when you open many tabs at one time, you can consider to enable the HTTP pipelining feature in the browser. By default, this feature is turned off and you have to manually tweak the browser configuration to enable it.

Steps to Enable HTTP Pipelining:

• Enter “about:config” at the address bar and press enter. You will see the following screen. So click “I'll be care, I promise”.

• In the filter box, type “pipelining” and you will see the following screen.

• Double-click the “network.http.pipelining”, it will be changed from the default “false” to “true”. Double-click again will change back to “false”. Since you want to enable the “http pipelining”, you make sure the value is “true”.

• Double-click the “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” and change the default value 4 to 8 .

• Click OK and close the page.
  

[Updated on 18 April 2010]
The supported maximum value for pipelining request in firefox is 8 - change 10 to 8.

Note: Why 8? It is up to you to set the value. If the value is too high, it probably will hurts more and cause more delays. 10 is just a recommended value that I play around with and it seems pretty cool. Of course, you can play around with your own number to optimize your browser's speed.

In short, HTTP pipeling is a HTTP protocol that does not required the client to wait for the server to respond and keep sending the request. Because there are some delays waiting the respond from the server, enabling this HTTP feature can actually speed up the browser's page loading speed. To know more about HTTP pipelining, you can visit here.

Increase Firefox Browsing Speed with AdBlock Plus

The most safest way (without registry tweaking) to increase the speed of your web browsing experience is to disable all those advertisements. The Addon “AdBlock Plus” does all that for you! I strongly recommend you to install this add-on in your Firefox for fastest browsing experience.

Without AdBlock Plus

With AdBlock Plus

As you can see, with the AdBlock Plus add on, the advertisements in this blog has been disabled and the most important thing is the actual content is still displayed properly without any errors.

The speed difference is obvious and significant if you visit those sites that have very heavy advertisements. Of course for my blog, you can NOT see any differences. So for the site like my blog, you can safely disable the AdBlock plus. :D Just kidding ... Anyway, you can still disable AdBlock Plus for certain website.

On the top right, click on the “ABP” and 2 most actions that I usually use are:

• Open Blockable Items – To see how many advertisements scripts have been blocked. You will be surprised with the number of block items...
  

• Disable on XXX page – For example, I disable that for all my blogs. :) Maybe you can do the same as well? Hahaha...
  

For the rest of the option, you can play around with that but usually you just leave it to default is good enough. Have fun!

To install this AdBlock Plus add-on, click here. You can also visit the official website here for latest development and discussion.