As you may recall, last month I’ve wrote an article about Pale Moon, a high performance browser compiled from Firefox.
Pale Moon is already heavily tweaked to provide such high performance, but during the last month I managed to find several tweaks that may (and probably will) improve your browsing experience.
Tip: Document everything you are doing, if you are not satisfied with the changes, it’s always a good idea to keep track on which features you’ve decided to tweak.
About:config
About:config is a web based interface, allows tweaking and refining your Firefox browser. Simply type about:config in your address bar and press Enter.
Each key is responsible for a different aspect of the browser, but don’t be afraid to experiment: you can always set the key back to default by Right-Click on the key, and choose Reset.
Let’s get to work
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server - Increases the maximum number of persistent connections per server which can help speed up loading of multimedia rich sites. Default is 6, change to 8
network.http.max-connections - This integer preference takes values between 1 and 65535 inclusive, directly corresponding to the maximum number of HTTP connections your browser can have open at once. Default is 48, change to 96
network.http.max-connections-per-server - The total number of HTTP connections the application can make to a single server is limited by this preference. If more connections are needed, they are queued until a connection "slot" is available. Default is 15, change to 32
network.dns.disableIPv6 – Most of the ISPs don’t support IPv6, no reason your browser will attempt resolving DNS to IPv6 based addresses. Default is True, change to False
config.trim_on_minimize – While minimizing your browser, Windows will attempt to reclaim some of the memory it has allocated to Firefox. By default, this value does not exist. To create it Right-Click->New->Boolean and set the value to to True
layout.spellcheckDefault – Will determine which text will be checked using the spell checker. The default is 1, which means only some areas will be examined. If you’d like Firefox to perform spell check on all text, change the value to 2
browser.urlbar.autofill - Inline autocomplete mimics behavior in Netscape Navigator 4.x as well as Internet Explorer (when IE's inline autocomplete is activated). As you type, entries you have previously typed that closely match appear highlighted after your typed text. By default the value is False, change it to True
accessibility.blockautorefresh - Web pages (and web servers) can ask a browser to automatically refresh a page after a given timeout by including the HTML element <meta http-equiv="refresh"> or by sending a Refresh: HTTP header. This can be helpful (as in the case of a webpage whose content is updated constantly) but it also can be irritating. Default is False, change to True
accessibility.typeaheadfind - Find As You Type (or Type Ahead Find as it was originally called) allows you to start finding text on the page immediately by simply typing the text you’re trying to find. Normally you need to trigger this feature by pressing ' (single quote) to search link text, or / (forward slash) to search all text. In Firefox, Find As You Type will also display the Find Bar at the bottom of the window and populate the Find field as you type. Default is False, change to True
nglayout.initialpaint.delay - Mozilla applications render web pages incrementally - they display what's been received of a page before the entire page has been downloaded. Since the start of a web page normally doesn't have much useful information to display, Mozilla applications will wait a short interval before first rendering a page. This preference controls that interval. Default is 150ms, which means that even the page had finished loading, it will still wait for 150ms before displaying the page. If you have a high-speed connection, change this to 0
browser.cache.memory.capacity – his preference controls the maximum amount of memory to use for caching decoded images, messages, and chrome items (application user interface elements). Default is 16384, change to 20480
Network.prefetch-next - Link prefetching is when a webpage hints to the browser that certain pages are likely to be visited, so the browser downloads them immediately so they can be displayed immediately when the user requests it. This preference controls whether link prefetching is enabled. If the value is False, change to True
browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer - Pages that were recently visited are stored in memory in such a way that they don't have to be re-parsed. This improves performance when pressing Back and Forward. This preference limits the maximum number of pages stored in memory. To disable, change to 0, for automatic set to -1.
network.http.proxy.pipelining - In HTTP 1.1, multiple requests can be sent before any responses are received. This is known as pipelining. Pipelining reduces network load and can reduce page loading times over high-latency connections, but not all servers support it. Some servers may even behave incorrectly if they receive pipelined requests. If a proxy server is configured, this preference controls whether to attempt to use pipelining with the proxy server. Default is False, change to True
browser.blink_allowed - Mozilla supports both the <blink> HTML element and the blink value for the text-decoration CSS property. The blinking content produced is usually irritating at best, disorienting and confusing at worst. Default is True, change to False
keyword.url - Any valid URL may be specified. The keyword will be appended to the URL and then the user will be redirected to the new URL. If you’re like me, and like Google, but hate going to their website every freaking minute, this will allow you to type keywords and google will redirect you to the first site in search. Change the value to http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=
One last tweak (advanced users)
You can slash Firefox's slow load time by compressing the DLLs and executable files. There are many choices for compression but I suggest you use UPX which is free, efficient and time proven. Although UPX is only 32 bit, it’s safe to use for 64 bit users as well since no change is made to the files.
- Download UPX from http://upx.sourceforge.net/#download
- Unzip upx.exe into your Firefox installation folder which is normally C:\Program Files\Pale Moon.
- Make sure Pale Moon is not running then shell to a command prompt (with Administrator rights) in the Pale Moon installation directory.
- Type in the following command in a single line and hit return:
for %v in (*.exe *.dll components\*.dll plugins\*.dll) do upx "C:\Program Files\Pale Moon\%v"
If on some later occasion you want to unpack the files, just type in the command above but add the decompression switch "-d" after "do upx."
Cheers,
at0m q[^_^]p
