the corner office

I came across these tips via linuxtoday.com. A Google search shows that these tips have been doing the rounds on a number of forums, and they both seem to emanate from this page at mozilla.org (which also has a heap of other config tips and tweaks).

There are two ways to make the changes:

1. type about:config into the address bar, which displays all settings and allows you to edit them.
2. quit Firefox, and edit user.js in your profile directory

To speed up browsing, using HTTP pipelining:

Modify the following settings:
Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

Caveat: not recommended unless you've got a broadband connection.

To speed up page rendering:

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 it acts on information it receives

... but heed the warning on the original Mozilla page about this not being a good idea for slower machines.

Ymmv, but so far I'm impressed!