Digging around today, I ran into this hack to allow Firefox to open more connections and to wait less time before rendering a page. It’s been a common hack for IE over the years, but I wasn’t aware there was something similar available for Firefox, it’s a noticeable difference if your on broadband.

In firefox, the following settings will optimize your browser to utilize more simultaneous connections when pulling down a website and it will remove the default delay that firefox waits to paint the page:

  1. Open your browser and in the address bar type about:config and hit enter
  2. In the filter box type network.http.pipelining
  3. The results will filter, double click network.http.pipelining and change the value to true
  4. Double click network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and change the value to 10
  5. Right click in the middle of the page and choose New -> String and name the String nglayout.initialpaint.delay
  6. Double click nglayout.initialpaint.delay and give it a value of 0

If you’re lazy like me, just go and install the FasterFox add on, which basically does all this and more for you.

Image of Firefox with above http pipelining and initial paint delay settings

And here’s the registry hack for IE:

  1. Click Start run and type regedit and click OK
  2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings
  3. Right click the Internet Settings folder and click New -> DWORD
  4. Give the Key a name of MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server with a Decimal value of 10
  5. Create another DWORD with a key of MaxConnectionsPerServer and a Decimal value of 10

Windows Regedit window displaying entered keys

This hack was found on Metacafe in video format, which I had to watch like 5 times while switching back and forth between tabs, which made me think, hmm maybe I should write this down somewhere.