Sunday, April 24, 2011

How to speed up Firefox by enabling HTTP Pipelining

How to speed up Firefox by enabling HTTP Pipelining
HTTP Pipelining is a user configable peference within Firefox that you can change to increase the speed that pages load. Pipelining is only supported in HTTP/1.1, not in 1.0. although a lot of people think that enabling Pipelining will put a strain on servers, this is wrong because HTTP pipelining allows fewer TCP packets to be sent over the network, therefor reducing network load. Does not increase speed when on secure web pages e.g HTTPS. if you wish to read more on HTTP Pipelining before you tackle this tutorial then here are two links for you to follow.
Note: Before taking on this tutorial please make sure you backup your Firefox, backup your Firefox,
because this tweak works for some and not for others and in some cases can even slow Firefox down. If you have backed up Firefox tho you have nothing to worry about, Also this tweak is said not to improve speed on dial up connections although some have reported it to work so its entirely your choice.
Step One


OK, lets start by opening up Firefox
Double Click the 'Firefox Icon' on the desktop
or
Hold down the 'windows key' and Press 'R' then type in Firefox and Press 'Enter'.



Step Two
 Now type about:config into the address bar and Press 'Enter'.



Step Three
Use the Filter bar to look for
network.http.pipelining
as seen in the image below.



Step Four
Double click on 'Network.http.pipelining' to change value to 'True'.

Step Five
 Now Double Click on the preference below, which is 'network.http.pipelining.maxrequests'
You will be displayed with a dialog box with the value of 4, change the value to 8
Click 'OK'



Step Six
Just to confirm, both your values should be the same as you see in the image below.
Confirming preference changes
.The developers have set the request at 8.Any further increase would not affect the performance.


Step Seven
Use the filter bar again to find 'network.http.proxy.pipelining'
showing network.http.proxy.pipelining



Step Eight
Once again Double Click 'network.http.proxy.pipelining' to change the value to true.
network.http.proxy.pipelining with a Value of True
.



Step Nine

Restart Firefox.
Done!

Now your web pages should load faster, as I said before if you have any problems with this tweak just restore Firefox with your backup. Just to let you know though, its working like a charm for me.