Firefox Hack and HTTP Pipelining

Here's a great hack (via Feld Thoughts and Subterrrain.net) to make Firefox download pages faster for broadband users. Browser requests are normally processed sequentially by the web server. HTTP pipelining allows multiple requests to be processed together. Pipelining also permits several HTTP requests to be built into a single TCP/IP packet.

To enable Firefox to take advantage of pipelining (from Feld Thoughts):

Royce Hall, By Tatler

"Go to the address bar in Firefox and type in "about:config" Look for the following lines: network.http.pipelining = false network.http.pipelining.maxrequests = 4 network.http.proxy.pipelining = false Change them to (by click/double-click the line): network.http.pipelining = true network.http.pipelining.maxrequests = 30 network.http.proxy.pipelining = true This configures the browser to make 30 requests at once and not wait for a reply to the request before making another request Then you need to create one new option: Right click anywhere on the page and select New-> Integer. (on a macintosh press the control key for right click) 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.  You need to restart Firefox for this to be enabled. On sites that support pipelining (not all do) the results are dramatic."