8 hacks to make Firefox ridiculously fast

In Depth: 8 hacks to make Firefox ridiculously fast

Firefox has been outperforming IE in every department for years, and version 3 is speedier than ever.

But tweak the right settings and you could make it faster still, more than doubling your speed in some situations, all for about five minutes work and for the cost of precisely nothing at all. Here's what you need to do.

1. Enable pipelining

Browsers are normally very polite, sending a request to a server then waiting for a response before continuing. Pipelining is a more aggressive technique that lets them send multiple requests before any responses are received, often reducing page download times. To enable it, type about:config in the address bar, double-click network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining so their values are set to true, then double-click network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and set this to 8.

Keep in mind that some servers don't support pipelining, though, and if you regularly visit a lot of these then the tweak can actually reduce performance. Set network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining to false again if you have any problems.

2. Render quickly

Large, complex web pages can take a while to download. Firefox doesn't want to keep you waiting, so by default will display what it's received so far every 0.12 seconds (the "content notify interval"). While this helps the browser feel snappy, frequent redraws increase the total page load time, so a longer content notify interval will improve performance.

Type about:config and press [Enter], then right-click (Apple users ctrl-click) somewhere in the window and select New > Integer. Type content.notify.interval as your preference name, click OK, enter 500000 (that's five hundred thousand, not fifty thousand) and click OK again.

Right-click again in the window and select New > Boolean. This time create a value called content.notify.ontimer and set it to True to finish the job.

3. Faster loading

If you haven't moved your mouse or touched the keyboard for 0.75 seconds (the content switch threshold) then Firefox enters a low frequency interrupt mode, which means its interface becomes less responsive but your page loads more quickly. Reducing the content switch threshold can improve performance, then, and it only takes a moment.

Type about:config and press [Enter], right-click in the window and select New > Integer. Type content.switch.threshold, click OK, enter 250000 (a quarter of a second) and click OK to finish.

4. No interruptions

You can take the last step even further by telling Firefox to ignore user interface events altogether until the current page has been downloaded. This is a little drastic as Firefox could remain unresponsive for quite some time, but try this and see how it works for you.

Type about:config, press [Enter], right-click in the window and select New > Boolean. Type content.interrupt.parsing, click OK, set the value to False and click OK.

5. Block Flash

Intrusive Flash animations are everywhere, popping up over the content you actually want to read and slowing down your browsing. Fortunately there's a very easy solution. Install the Flashblock extension (flashblock.mozdev.org) and it'll block all Flash applets from loading, so web pages will display much more quickly. And if you discover some Flash content that isn't entirely useless, just click its placeholder to download and view the applet as normal.

6. Increase the cache size

As you browse the web so Firefox stores site images and scripts in a local memory cache, where they can be speedily retrieved if you revisit the same page. If you have plenty of RAM (2 GB of more), leave Firefox running all the time and regularly return to pages then you can improve performance by increasing this cache size. Type about:config and press [Enter], then right-click anywhere in the window and select New > Integer. Type browser.cache.memory.capacity, click OK, enter 65536 and click OK, then restart your browser to get the new, larger cache.

7. Enable TraceMonkey

TraceMonkey is a new Firefox feature that converts slow Javascript into super-speedy x86 code, and so lets it run some functions anything up to 20 times faster than the current version. It's still buggy so isn't available in the regular Firefox download yet, but if you're willing to risk the odd crash or two then there's an easy way to try it out.

Install the latest nightly build (ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/), launch it, type about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Type JIT in the filter box, then double-click javascript.options.jit.chrome and javascript.options.jit.content to change their values to true, and that's it - you're running the fastest Firefox Javascript engine ever.

8. Compress data

If you've a slow internet connection then it may feel like you'll never get Firefox to perform properly, but that's not necessarily true. Install toonel.net (toonel.net) and this clever Java applet will re-route your web traffic through its own server, compressing it at the same time, so there's much less to download. And it can even compress JPEGs by allowing you to reduce their quality. This all helps to cut your data transfer, useful if you're on a limited 1 GB-per-month account, and can at best double your browsing performance.

Cuil - long on marketing, short on effectiveness

in my previous post it was an description of the new search engine...latest reviews suggest cuil is not that good !

Cuil - long on marketing, short on effectiveness

Cuil - long on marketing, short on effectiveness
By philipbradley on Search engines
(from http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2008/07/cuil---long-on-marketing-short-on-effectiveness.html)
'Cuil' is pronounced 'cool' or more likely 'kewl'. It's never a good sign when you have to start by telling people this, but at least it's not gone down the double 'o' route. Cuil has been around in stealth mode for a while, but it's exploded onto the general public scene in the last few days with a blaze of (unwarranted) publicity. It's making great claims, and some people are talking about it as the latest Google killer. I've played around with it for a while, so lets take a look at some of the features and functions.
It indexes 120 billion pages. I think that I'm supposed to be impressed by that, but I think we left the macho posturing of 'We index more than you' behind a long time ago. It is interesting to note that Google released their little note last week about being aware of a trillion webpages - they didn't actually say that they indexed that many, just that they knew about it. Even if it's the largest index that simply means that there's even more pages that I'm not going to look at, with the whole long tail business. Having said that, having run a few test searches against Google, Big G still comes out with more results. So, the size of the index doesn't mean a great deal to me. However one could argue that if Cuil does have a bigger index it behoves it to use that effectively. This brings me onto my second point, one of functionality.
I'm quite frankly astonished that there is no indication on the site of search functionality. As regular readers know - one of my hobby horses is help pages or cheat sheets. Google's pretty good on this, with examples, cheat sheets and so on. Cuil has *nothing*. They are expecting their users to either whack in a few words and thats it, or they're so confident of getting good results they think they don't need to provide help. However, I've got to play around and see what Boolean operators work, proximity, what file formats are searched, does it limit by country or language, can I limit by time/date - I have no idea. I'm going to have to waste MY time trying to do THEIR work for them, and quite simply it's not going to happen that quickly. So, functionality is limited to heavens knows what and there's no advanced search function. Which, if the index is as big as they say it is, is pretty poor.
The display of results is a little different, in that it's in magazine style. This isn't unique - Silobreaker for example takes that approach as well, and Exalead allows for different displays of results. Users can choose if they want 2 or 3 columns. We're expected to guess which is the relevant result - is it in the top left hand corner? The top 3 results? Who can say - it's just part of the Cuil guessing game. There are two further search/display options. The first are a series of tabs across the top of the page to focus on particular categories. Great in concept but poor in execution. A search for 'Everton' for example brings me up tabs for Everton FC and Everton Football. Quite what the difference between them is I'm not entirely sure, and I'm not going to waste time getting into a guessing game. The other option is an explore by category approach. Cuil gives us the option of exploring Premiership teams, and of the teams they list in this section 80% are not IN the Premiership. This is not right - it's not even wrong! It's hopelessly inept, and quite frankly inexcusable. This does not give me any kind of trust in their system at all.
It gets worse. Next to a lot of the results entries are images. These apparently relate directly to the result but they don't. I ran a search for me (the way you do) and up popped a link to my Flickr collection. Sensible and good so far - except that the image shown isn't one of my images! I have no idea where this image comes from and have no way of finding out. Disgraceful. This isn't a single error - it happens time and time again - images do NOT relate to the pages that are returned. Total shambles.
Cuil is hot on the concept of privacy - to the extent that they don't keep any kind of information on who is searching for what. No problem with this, but it does mean that they've tied themselves into a system where they're not going to be able to offer personalisation, and given that this is going to be an increasingly hot topic in the future means that they're sidelining themselves from the start.
I hope that Cuil improves - the more, and better the engines, the more we'll all benefit. However, this is so ineffectual that it's not going to be competing with Google - ever. If people are looking for the elusive Google Killer they'd better get used to the idea that it's not going to be this one. If you're looking for an alternative to the major players - Exalead is still (in my opinion) your best bet.