3 Ways to Speed Up the Internet Browsing Experience on Firefox

Most users of Firefox have, at one time or the other, complained of the infamous RAM leak bug. The problem caused the browser to use enormous amounts of RAM memory resources when multiple tabs where opened at the same time. However, calling this a bug is not quite right. Mozilla has included this as a cache feature in Firefox. Simply put, this is the manner in which multiple tabs are cached in Firefox.

Many studies have shown that close to 40% of web page navigations simply involve going back to pages that were browsed less than 12 pages ago. Also, most of this re-navigation takes place through the use of the ‘Back’ button. Mozilla has simply implemented a Back-Forward cache in Firefox that helps with this pattern. The cache retains data of all the rendered documents for the last five session history entries for every tab. Naturally, with such a large amount of data, the overall RAM usage is bound to shoot up with multiple tabs open. But the end result is a faster web navigation performance.

The tweaks explained below aim to cut down on this extensive memory usage of Firefox without compromising too much on the browsing experience.

Making Firefox Reduce the RAM Memory Used for Cache Feature

• Type the following command without quotes into the browser’s address bar, “about:config”
• Locate “browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer”
• Set value of the above to “0”

Bring Down RAM Consumption to 10MB When Firefox is Minimized

• Retrace the first step given in the above trick.
• Now right click in the page and choose “New->Boolean”.
• A box will now pop up where you need to enter “config.trim_on_minimize”. Hit Enter.
• Now choose ‘True’ and hit Enter.
• Restart the browser.

Boost the Page Loading Speed of Firefox

a) “about:config”, press Enter after typing this command into the browser’s address box.

The essence of this method lies in making Firefox send multiple requests to any webpage at a time. Normally, the browser sends only one which is why ‘pipelining’ boosts the page loading times.

b) Make changes to the entries in the below specified manner.

Change “network.http.pipelining” to “true”

Change “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”

Change “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to a random figure like 10.

This ensures that the browser sends out 10 requests simultaneously to the same page.

c) Finally, right click in any part and choose “New->Integer”. Enter “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” as the new name and set the value at “0”.

By setting the value at zero, you’ve now ensured that your browser does not wait (the value indicates the waiting time) before acting on the information sent to it. Users of broadband internet connections will experience faster page loading times with this change.

For an even better and faster browsing experience, you could perform some more operations in the “about:config” window. They are as specified below,

• “network.dns.disableIPv6”; set “false”
• “content.notify.backoffcount”; set “5”
• “plugin.expose_full_path”; set “true”

“ui.submenuDelay”; set “0”