I came across this link tonight, and it’s good stuff. After applying these items, I noticed a huge improvement of the speed which Firefox loads pages.

How To Speed Up Firefox (Helpful Vanity)

Posted on 12/12/2004 12:45:50 PM PST by KoRn

Here’s something for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up:

1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

If you’re using a broadband connection you’ll load pages MUCH faster now!

I was also reading somewhere (I don’t remember where now.. I restarted Firefox to check out the above changes) that you shouldn’t make the last “nglayout” change on OSX for some reason. But give it a try– you’ll like it! Of course this also increases the load on a given webserver as it gets more simultaneous requests per browser, but I’d say that the the speed improvement is worth it.