Following on from my previous article, Firefox 3 Easter Eggs, I have discovered that broadband users can get a significant speed increase from Firefox just by changing a couple of settings.  Firefox is distributed with settings that will work with any machine or setup, but really anyone with a half-decent connection can make these changes and get a great speed increase, and here’s how you do it!

Inside the address bar type:

about:config

and then find:

network.http.pipelining 
network.http.proxy.pipelining

and set them both to “true”.  This adjusts the pipelining settings. Then find

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

and set it to 8, though you should feel free to play with this number a little and tweak it as you see fit - the article http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.pipelining.maxrequests suggests that 8 is easily sufficient.

Finally, right-click on any setting and select ‘new’ and then ‘integer’.   Set the name to “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” (you might want to copy & paste it) and set the value to “0” (zero).  This removes the render delay.

And hey presto you should notice a significant speed increase from a simple optimization!

ps. You may be interested in a related article: Firefox 3 Easter Eggs (fun hidden messages in firefox 3).