If you have fast Internet connection, you can make your Firefox browser download webpages significantly faster by adjusting some settings.

Ordinarily, when your browser downloads a webpage, it gets many different components such as text, external javascript files, many images, css files, etc. Your browser requests these components one at a time from the server. This requires many connections, extending the amount of time it takes the web page to load.

But, how about bunching together many requests, and sending them to the server all at once? That would eliminate all the time-consuming setting up and tearing down of connections that the server would normally do. And that is exactly what Firefox would do once it is configured the way we're about to.

Remember, this configuration is not useful for slow dial-up Internet connections. This is because a dialup connection cannot download the data fast enough from the server, and the time saved is lost waiting for data to go through.

Now let's configure Firefox.

1. Type about:config into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:
   • network.http.pipelining
   • network.http.proxy.pipelining
   • network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

2. Alter the entries as follows:
   • Double click network.http.pipelining to have a value true
   • Double click network.http.proxy.pipelining to have a value true
   • Double click network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and type a high value, e.g. 40

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New, Integer.
   • Name it nglayout.initialpaint.delay
   • set its value to 0. 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 MUCH faster now!