[Sussex] Firefox users take note....

[Mark Harrison]

I know that quite a lot of SLUG people use Firefox

You can dramatically speed up "browsing rendering"speed by
turning on request pipelining by doing as follows.

This will not effect downloading of large files in the slightest. What
it will do is change how fast a typical "rich web page" - ie a page
made up of 20-50 images / bits of text loads and renders by loading
the images in parallel rather than one at a time.

In my experience today, it has made pages load much, much faster!

Note that there appears to be some discussion in Internet circles as
to whether this will start to cause server problems. I've not noticed
any problems, but time will tell.


1. Type "about:config" into the address bar (no spaces) and hit Return.
Scroll down and look for the following entries:
--network.http.pipelining
--network.http.proxy.pipelining
--network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request at a time to a Web page. When you
enable pipelining, the browser will make several at once, which really
speeds up page loading.
2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. (This
tells the browser to make 30 requests at once.)
3. Lastly, right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it
"nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the
amount of time the browser waits before acting on received information.