saved by20 people, first byAt the Money on 2007-05-30, last byRyan C on 2008-07-03
Start rendering pages faster
Creating an nglayout.initialpaint.delay integer preference lets you control how long Firefox waits before starting to render a page. If this value isn't set, Firefox defaults to 250 milliseconds, or 0.25 of a second. Some people report that setting it to 0 -- i.e., forcing Firefox to begin rendering immediately -- causes almost all pages to show up faster. Values as high as 50 are also pretty snappy.
Reduce the number of reflows
When Firefox is actively loading a page, it periodically reformats or "reflows" the page as it loads, based on what data has been received. Create a content.notify.interval integer preference to control the minimum number of microseconds (millionths of a second) that elapse between reflows. If it's not explicitly set, it defaults to 120000 (0.12 of a second).
Too many reflows may make the browser feel sluggish, so you can increase the interval between reflows by raising this to 500000 (500,000, or 1/2 second) or even to 1000000 (1 million, or 1 second). If you set this value, be sure to also create a Boolean value called content.notify.ontimer and set it to true.
Select just a word
The Boolean preference layout.word_select.eat_space_to_next_word governs one of Firefox's tiny, but for me incredibly annoying, little behaviors. When you double-click on a word in a Web page to select it, Firefox automatically includes the space after the word. Most of the time I don't want that; I just want the selection to stop at the end of the word. Setting this to false will defeat that behavior.
Select a word and its punctuation
Somewhat contrarily, if you double-click a word that's next to any kind of punctuation mark, Firefox defaults to selecting only the word itself, not its adjacent punctuation. Set the Boolean preference layout.word_select.stop_at_punctuation to false to select the word and its adjacent punctuation.
Turn on pipelining
The Boolean preference network.http.pipelining enables an experimental acceleration technique called "pipelining," which speeds up the loading of most Web pages. A browser normally waits for some acknowledgment of a given request from a server before attempting to send another one to that server; pipelining sends multiple requests at once without waiting for responses one at a time.
If you turn this on (that is, set its value to true), also be sure to create or edit the integer preference network.http.pipelining.maxrequests, which controls the maximum number of requests that can be pipelined at once. 16 should do it; some people go as high as 128 but there's not much evidence it'll help. (If you use a proxy, set network.http.proxy.pipelining to true as well.)
