Speed up your browser

[Syzygys]

Here is a little trick I learnt/discovered recently. In FF download an adblocker and it speeds up your browser by as much as 50%. Really. What is even more interesting, it speeds up Opera too, although one would think it only works in FF.

I tried Adblock Plus first, and now foof, and both had the same effect. 40-50% speed increase....

[firdroirich]

If adblock speeds it up by 50%, then I'd say noscript puts it in overdrive.

[Dr Mabuse]

If you really want to make a performance change in your Firefox browser, this is a mod I do EVERY time on a new system. It fundamentally affects the browser and how long it delays loading, and how many objects it will load simultaneously.

This makes a visible(huge) difference on many sites, notably forums like this one with many small loads.

ONLY do this on a broadband connection, not on dial-up.

1. Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return, tell it you will be careful, and DO be careful.

Scroll down and look for the following entries:(the list is alphabetized)

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

Normally the browser will make three requests to a web page at a time(may have been updated since I last wrote this). When you enable and expand pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter or confirm the entries as follows:(Only change if needed)

Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"(Right click and choose 'toggle' if needed)

Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"(Same)

Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.(Right click and choose 'modify' to change the number, I set mine to 40)

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 it acts on information it receives.

You'll like this.

Clear your cache out or just run CCleaner, then try out browsing.

[Syzygys]

I forgot to mention that AVG slows the browser down badly, so you should turn the Link screening off at least and see how much faster the browser becomes...

I don't think I can make FF much faster, specially not on forums, it loads pretty much immediately already...

The funny thing is if I can get a 7 year old dirt cheap computer to browse the net with 20 Mb/s, what's the point of all this dual or quad core inventions??? :)

[Stryder]

The funny thing is if I can get a 7 year old dirt cheap computer to browse the net with 20 Mb/s, what's the point of all this dual or quad core inventions??? :)

High end gaming. Production uses like 3D Modelling, Graphics manipulation or Video editing and pretty much anything that draws your system to a crawl normally. All Multicores to my knowledge are native 64-bit too, meaning the amount of information they can handle is double* that of the older 32-bit architecture.

(*Meh, have to add a disclaimer about how I could actually be wrong :p )

What improvements I've seen in my own Core2Duo is system stability, since I've done things on here that would of locked up an older computer and would of required a reboot, the extra core just helps it tick over in those situations.

The down side of multicore's is of course the fact that they run at a higher temperature and consume more power. Serious battery killers on a laptop.

As for speeding up browsers obviously the removal of images from sites will speed up them no end.

If you want to see real speed you could always get a hold of Lynx (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)) or learn how to use Telnet to access port 80 of most servers (don't expect to have SSL/HTTPS connection though) In both cases it's completely no thrills and expect in the latter case to wade through lines of line of Hypertext formatting to see any information on the website.

[Syzygys]

I wonder how many % of computers used for high end gaming. I would say less than 20%... So for the most of us, there is no point in constant innovation...

[firdroirich]

True, Syzgys, at 1 time I was experimenting to see how far back I could downgrade using linux. This began with ubuntu 'hoary hedgehog' (version 5) right up till version 7. The best results came using the enlightenment desktop e17 with feisty... I was able to run it on P2 133MHz with 64MB RAM. The uprade myth is maintained to keep profits up, it is very possible to downgrade for free