Firefox is a great web browser and it is open source. It is the the most web browser in the world, few days back Google Chrome was the number 1 web browser for one day. In the past months Firefox was on the third number in world web browser usage share. Today we will go through some tweaks to speed up Firefox web browser. Latest version of Fire fox is 12.0 Beta 3 you can download or upgrade it . Speed up Firefox is really simple. There are basically two techniques which are really helpful.
Speed Up Firefox
Before Speed up Firefoxit is important to create a backing up
You should make a note of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ values of each tweak and (highly recommended!) backup the Firefox preferences file that contains all the configuration options in case you want to revert back to your original settings:
The configuration file is called prefs.js and can be found in the following place in your operating system drive (usually C: drive):
\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile ID>.default\ inWindows XP or
\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile ID>.default\ in Vista and Windows 7.
You may need to show hidden files to view the folder. Copy the prefs.js file to another location on your hard drive whilst Firefox is closed.
Tweaking Firefox
Open Firefox and type about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the “I’ll be careful I Promise” warning button to reveal a long list of preferences used in Firefox.
- To change a preference – if it is an integer (number) or a string (text), double click on the preference name and you will be prompted for the new value. If it is a Boolean (true or false) value, double click the entry to switch from true to false or vice versa – double clicking it again will revert it to its original value
- To add a preference (if the preference name is not already listed in your about:config page) right click on an empty space in the about:config window and choose New followed by String, Integer or Boolean depending whether the value of the preference is text (String), a number (Integer) or true/false (Boolean)
Changing Preferences
Change or add the following preferences to the new values shown. If the preference is already set to this value then skip it and move on the next. If the preference does not exist then you need to add it:
browser.display.show_image_placeholders: false
Stops the display of placeholders while images are loading to speed up the page. Default is True
browser.tabs.animate: false
Disables all tab animation features (e.g. when you click the ‘New Tab’ (+) button) to make the tab interface feel quicker. Default is True
network.prefetch-next: true
This allows Firefox to automatically prefetch (load) the contents of pages linked to by the page you are viewing e.g. this site uses prefetch to load the TechLogon homepage in the background, making it quicker for you to view next if you want to 
To take advantage of increased speed browsing websites which use prefetch, keep this setting at the Default which is True.
(Note: some people view prefetch as a possible security risk and disable it. My current view is that it isn’t a major concern – if a site is bad, it will just load bad stuff on the current page anyway without needing to prefetch it from elsewhere.)
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server: 8
Increases the maximum number of persistent connections per server which can help speed up loading of multimedia rich sites. Default is 6
network.http.pipelining: true
Can send multiple requests to a server together in order to speed up loading of webpages. This is not supported by ALL servers – some servers may even behave incorrectly if they receive pipelined requests. Default is False
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests: 8
Sets a maximum number of multiple requests that can be pipelined to prevent overloading the server. Higher values will cause a delay before the first request completes but will make the last request complete sooner. Higher values will also cause more of a delay if a connection fails. The maximum value is 8. Default is 4
network.dns.disableIPv6: true
Disables IPv6 DNS lookups to prevent a significant delay with poorly configured IPv6 servers. Default is False
Optional: if you want Google searches in the address bar to search by name and go straight to the right website (e.g. New York Times would go straight to the nytimes.com website) rather than just perform a standard Google search, change the value of the keyword.url preference as shown below below:
keyword.url: http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=
(Note: this is for google.com – you may want to change it to your own country version e.g. for UK just replace the google.com bit with google.co.uk)
Now close Firefox and re-open it to apply all the tweaks – you should find Firefox is quicker and more responsive
Speed Up Firefox
These are some nerdy tweaks. if you want to speed up Firefox without any tweaking and hard kind of stuff you can try the simple method.
Follow these steps:
- Download SpeedyFox from the link below- Click Here
- After the download
- It will automatically select your available profiles. select from the list and click on Optimize button.
After applying these method you will difference in the speed and response time of the Firefox. Speed up Firefox is almost done. .
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