Increase the pipeline requests Firefox makes to download a page from a web server to speed up Firefox.

If you have a high speed internet connection (which most of us do have these days I believe) you can make use of your high speed bandwidth to speed up Firefox. By default Firefox uses 4 pipelines to get the information from a web server. With a high speed internet connection you can increase that number to a higher number to let Firefox use more pipelines to download more information from the web server which eventually will improve the performance of page loads.

Follow these steps to speed up your Firefox performance,

Step-1: Firefox Configuration

Launch Firefox and type-in “about:config” on the URL bar and press Enter.

You’ll get a funny warning about your Firefox warranty. Just click on the “I’ll be careful, I promise” button. Firefox will take you to the configuration page.

Step-2: Network.HTTP.Pipelining

Type-in “Network.HTTP.Pipelining” (without the quotes) on the Filter box. Make sure it has a value of “TRUE”. If not then double-click to change the value from false to true.

Step-3: Network.HTTP.Proxy.Pipelining

Type-in “Network.HTTP.Proxy.Pipelining” (without the quotes) on the Filter box. Make sure it has a value of “TRUE”. If not then double-click to change the value from false to true.

Step-4: Network.HTTP.Pipelining.MaxRequests

Type-in “Network.HTTP.Pipelining.MaxRequests” (without the quotes) on the Filter box. By default it will have a value of 4.

Double-click to change that value to 25. I would to recommend to keep the value between 20 and 30 depending on your internet connection speed.

Step-5: Restart Firefox

Restart Firefox for the changes to take effect.

There is a theory that even if you increase the Network.HTTP.Pipelining.MaxRequests to 30 it is not going to open up 30 pipelines but instead it only opens 8 pipelines. I have a really high speed Fiber Optic internet connection and I noticed some difference when I set the value to 10 and then to 20. So it depends on the internet connection speed you’ve got. The initial value of 4 is for dial-up connections and so you can take a guess with the numbers that best suites your internet connection speed.

I hope this trick helps you to speed up Firefox in terms of downloading pages. If you have any questions or comments regarding this please make sure to let us know in comments.