How to Increase Mozilla Firefox Browsing and Startup Speed

• Are you experiencing slow speed and lagging web experience from your favourite browser- Mozilla Firefox? This generally happens after using Firefox over time. 
• Restarting browser doesn’t help and neither restarting the computer. So how can you improve and refurbish Firefox’s declining speed and efficiency?

Well, over the due course of this article we’ll be discussing on the topic how to speed up your Mozilla Firefox? We’ve gathered some tricks and tweaks that will put your Firefox again into efficient and balanced position. And we believe, if you’ll carefully follow this guide and apply all the methods together, you’ll experience a 100% of speed increase, be it a web browsing experience, Firefox start up time or browsing speed.

Tweaks to Speed Up Mozilla Firefox Browsing:

• Before moving on to some Tweaks on increasing mozilla firefox speed, check out the article on - How to Increase Internet Speed.

Configuring settings in Firefox’s “about:config” option:

1) You can increase the speed by Reducing RAM required by Firefox for its Cache Management.

Follow the steps:

• Open Firefox browser and type “about:config” (without quotes) in the address bar.

• In the search field, look for: “browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer” and change its value to “0”.

2) By default at a time, Firefox makes only one request while opening a web page for you but by increasing and allowing Firefox to make several requests at a time, we can increase the page loading speed and this can be achieved by enable pipelining.

1. Open Firefox browser and type “about:config” (without quotes) in the address bar.
2. In the search field:

Find:  “network.http.pipelining” & change to “true” by double clicking on it.
Find: “network.http.proxy.pipelining” and change it to “true”.
Find:  “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” and change it to 10.

Now browser will make 10 requests at once.





3) This trick involves in changing the amount of time assigned to browser it uses to act on received information and it works effectively if you’re using a broad band connection.

1. Open Firefox browser and type “about:config” (without quotes) in the address bar.
2. Right Click anywhere in empty portion and click New> Integer. Name the new Integer as:  “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and assign it a   “0” value.
3. Similarly you can create the  following values to increase speed of Firefox:

Create a new Boolean: “network.dns.disableIPv6” and set value to “false”.
Create a new Integer: “content.notify.backoffcount” and set the value to 5.
Create a new Boolean:  “plugin.expose_full_path” and set the value to “true”.
Create a new Integer:  “ui.submenuDelay” and set the value to 0.

4) Finally the last method with which you can reduce the RAM usage of Firefox when it is minimized to taskbar. This little hack will help you to free up some RAM for your system when you’re not browsing.

1. Open Firefox browser and type “about:config” (without quotes) in the address bar.
2. Right Click anywhere in empty portion and click New> Boolean. Name the new Boolean in the pop up as:  “config.trim_on_minimize” and assign it “true” value.
3. Restart the Firefox.

Using Firefox extension- FasterFox:

There’s another way to increase the browsing or Internet speed in Firefox with the help of an extension/add-on for Firefox called FasterFox. It works pretty cool for me and I was able to notice some significant improvement in browsing speed. However, it won’t work well on my old computer with basic configuration.  So I won’t recommend it to users with low-configuration systems.

How FasterFox works?

• FasterFox recycles all the useless or ideal bandwidth and utilizes it to load web pages much faster. 

Download Fasterfox Here.

Basic ways to speed up Firefox:

Remove Unwanted Addons and Pugins:

• To decrease the start-up Firefox loading time, remove unwanted add-ons or extensions.

• All add-ons lower the start-up loading times by fraction of seconds, therefore more the add-ons higher will be start-up loading time.
• The add-ons or extensions that used Internet connection can lower the browsing speed, so we’ll suggest you to avoid those add-ons that use Internet connection.

Disable Unwanted Addons,Plugins and Extensions.

Clear Cookies from Time to Time:

• Cookies, cache, history and other temporary files are also responsible for Firefox’s declining speed and efficiency. We’ll suggest them to remove all these files 2-3 times a month.

You can remove these files by going to: options>Security. Choose “clear your recent history” to wipe history and “Remove cookies” option to remove cookies. Also delete the unnecessary bookmarks.

• There’s another small effective trick to decrease the start-up Firefox loading time. Right click on the Firefox icon and choose properties.

• Select the target field and in the end of url “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe”, give a space and type “/Prefetch:1” (without quotes). Remember to put space as without specifying space this trick will not work.

All the above mentioned tweaks and tricks are fairly easy to apply. We believe these tricks will make your favourite browser at least 2-3 times much faster. Although some tricks may not work for you as some of them depends upon the configuration of your system and some upon Internet connection. Anyway, if you have any interesting working trick to speed up the Firefox, do share it with us through comments.