Firefox Performance Preferences
A number of Third-Party/Unofficial Builders add performance preferences
to their builds which can improve Firefox performance and the overall
browsing experience. I don't use these in my builds as I like to stay
as close to the Official Builds as I can even though I may personally
use performance preferences in my local installations.
I did some testing with performance preferences and found about a 2%
improvement in my JPEG rendering benchmark suite. What I do is use a
text editor to add the lines below to the all.js file in the
defaults\pref subdirectory off the main Firefox directory.
pref("dom.max_script_run_time", 5);
pref("dom.disable_window_status_change", true);
pref("content.notify.backoffcount", 5);
pref("content.notify.interval", 750000);
pref("content.notify.ontimer", true);
pref("content.maxtextrun", 8191);
pref("content.max.tokenizing.time", 3000000);
pref("content.interrupt.parsing", true);
pref("content.switch.threshold", 750000);
pref("network.http.pipelining", true);
pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true);
pref("network.http.pipelining.maxrequests", 8);
pref("network.http.max-connections", 48);
pref("network.http.max-connections-per-server", 32);
pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy", 16);
pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server", 8);
pref("browser.display.show_image_placeholders", false);
pref("ui.submenuDelay", 100);
pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 500);
pref("browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers", 15);
User Prefs
I'm going to provide a list of user prefs that I find helpful for general browsing or to improve performance.
- pref("browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction", 2); turns on single window mode.
If my long vendor string is causing problems with an extension, you can
always go and edit the all.js file in the defaults\pref folder and
change it to whatever you'd like. (mmoy) may work best with finicky
extensions.
FireTune
In addition, I've heard some pretty good reports on a free product
called FireTune that will change Performance Preferences without the
user having to change about:config settings or edit Javascript files.
Their product is available at http://www.totalidea.com/freestuff4.htm
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Updated February 7, 2005. For comments and questions, send email to Vector.x64 @ gmail.com (without the spaces).