Firefox Speed Hack

By Deane Barker on January 3, 2005

Speed up Firefox: This hack has been floating around quite a bit in the last week — I’ve read about it in four different places now. I did it, but didn’t notice much of a speed increase. Anyone else?

This tip will speed up your Firefox significantly, but will mainly work for broadband users. To achieve this speed increase you need to alter certain settings of Firefox to speed up page requests and the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.



  1. A friend at work had a comment about this “speed hack”…

    “[This is a] really bad idea, don’t do it. This makes you really hammer servers with connections and some will be set to automatically ban you for having too many connections from a single IP address. The max you should have (in terms of what is considered okay) is two simultaneous connections to a single server.

    Also, the initial paint delay is set to ¼ of a second so that it doesn’t have to redrawn the layout after receiving more information. It actually makes it take longer to render if you set it to zero as they would suggest (as it then has to redraw it multiple times as it gets more information).

    But apart from that, yeah, pretty neat.”

  2. I thought this exact same thing when I was doing it. I wondered that if everyone using Firefox did this, wouldn’t some servers start taking a serious beating? The page re-drawing limitations are addresses at length in Dave’s link above.

  3. I tested it out for the heck of it and didn’t notice much of a boost, and I did have some problems with Flash and other media-intensive sites. I switched the settings back yesterday.

  4. it shouldn’t have a negative impact on the server.

    yes it increases the number of connections, but it also reduces the time you need the server for.

    So it should all even out in the end.

  5. Well, I’ve done this mod on my two computers and at first, I didn’t notice a difference when I changed everything. I restored one on the firefoxs to normal and left the other one with the mod on and stacked them next to each other and went to the same site [cookies,temp files,ect. were deleted and the computers are exactly the same make,brand, and models so that isn’t a factor] and I did notice that the one with the firefox mod goes just a bit faster…my advice: If you have no idea what your doing don’t mess with it =]
