How To Speed Up Firefox On Slower Systems [Simple Tweak]

When you run a slow computer and/or a slow Internet connection, browsing the Net can be a bit of a challenge. Fortunately, Firefox offers many tweaks to help you speed things a bit.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the about:config command in Firefox opens the door to many useful tweaks. Probably there are hundreds of useful settings among them and it might take a life time to try them all, but if you run a slow computer, here is a tweak you can use:

1. In the address bar, type about:config and when it opens, type: network.http.max-connections
2. Double click the property and change the value to a lower setting – i.e. 15-20 should do but if you notice that you need more connections, go back and increase it. The limited number of simultaneous connections could lead to more frequent error messages that the server/page is not found but it will certainly speed things up. When fewer connections are active simultaneously, there are more resources for each of them.
3. You can also limit the max number of connections per server (use network.http.max-connections-per-server and set it to 10 or lower), the max number of persistent connections per proxy (use network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy and set it to 10 or less), and the max number of persistent connections per server (use network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server and set it to 6 or less).
4. To further speed things up, you could disable auto refresh. Auto refresh is by default done when the computer is idle, so it shouldn’t be that much of a burden for you but still, if your resources are very limited, disabling it could help. Use the browser.cache.check_doc_frequency setting and set it to 2. In this case the page will refresh only when you explicitly reload it.

There are additional settings that could also speed browsing but let’s start with these ones and see what their effect is.

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