Technically Personal!

It is no secret that Firefox allows the users to tweak and play with its settings and there have been numerous posts explaining how to speed up Firefox by tweaking few settings. I myself had collected and put together a post listing all the tweaks / hacks for Firefox 3.

But even after meddling with most of the settings, I was finding the Firefox RAM usage to be unmanageable, especially since I open lots of tabs in a single window! Luckily I bumped upon a post on an underground forum where the poster claimed to Double the Internet Speed with just 3 hacks.

1. Reduce the RAM usage for Firefox Caching feature

• Type “about:config” (without quotes) in the address bar in the browser.

• Find “browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer”

• Set it’s value to “0′ (Zero)
  

2. Increase Firefox Page Loading time

• Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit Enter.
  

• Alter the entries as follows:
  Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
  Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
  Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 10.
  This means it will make 10 requests at once.

• Lastly, right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″ (Zero)

This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. If you’re using a broadband connection you’ll load pages faster now.

Optionally (for even faster web browsing) here are some more options for your about:config (you might have to create some of these entries by Right Click –> New– > Interger or String

network.dns.disableIPv6: set “false”
“content.notify.backoffcount”: set “5“; (Five)
“plugin.expose_full_path”: set “true”.
“ui.submenuDelay”: set “0; (zero)

3. Reduce RAM usage drastically when Firefox is minimized

• Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.

• Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.

• In the box that pops up enter “config.trim_on_minimize”. Press Enter.

• Now select True and then press Enter.

• Restart Firefox.

I hope this will help you in managing the RAM usage of Firefox in a better way. If it increases the Internet speed by 203 times as claimed by the author is still debatable, we will be able to tell that only when sufficient data is available. Do let me know your experiences with the tweakings.

Update: It looks like the poster on the forum had flicked this post from Gnoted. It looks like a real good blog, do have a look around.

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