Speeding Up Your Web Browser

A client recently complained of extreme slowness in his computer, especially when browsing the Internet. Now, as many of you know, that is a possible sign of a malware infection and the client correctly suspected so. And so did I at first. A thorough check with specialized detection tools and detailed running programs analysis revealed… nothing. So with that possibility out of the way, I just went down the list of other possible reasons for the problem. The computer itself was not very fast, but even so the browsing was excruciatingly slow.

I checked the internet connection speed, which at some point had been a problem in the past. But not anymore, speed was very decent. The default browser was Mozilla Firefox, and although that’s not the fastest browser, it is at least faster than Internet Explorer (in case you’re wondering, as of this writing Chrome and Opera are the fastest). So I decided to look into the browser’s installed plug-ins (in general terms, plug-ins are small additions to a larger program that enable certain additional functions). I directed the client to use Firefox without ANY plug-ins running, and the speed change result was instantaneous and considerable. So we had the general area to address.

Rather than trying to find out which individual plug-ins were slowing the browser down to then proceed to disable them, I tried a different approach: I got ALL the plug-ins disabled, and enabled only the couple that were absolutely needed for the browser to function properly. At the end of that the browser was still quite faster than before.

Therefore, if your browser is slow as hell and pages take forever to load, providing your computer is not from 2000 or you use Internet Explorer ( 🙂 ), has no malware infection or a really slow internet connection (read this on how to test your internet connection speed), this is something you might want to look into, for this is one of the cases where less is more.

2 thoughts on “Speeding Up Your Web Browser

  1. Hi,

    I enjoyed your article re speeding up web browsers. There’s another thing I was able to do to speed up Firefox without doing away with the plug-ins. I think I got it from, newsletter@howtogeek.com (or some similar thing). But here’s the method: In the address bar in Firefox type in, about:config. Press Enter. A caution message will pop up along the lines of ‘are you sure you wanna do this’ kind of thing. OK it or Yes it or whatever it says you need to do to go to the next step which will be to access a large list of things to choose from. Scroll down the list to, network.http.pipelining. Double click there and where it says “False”, change it to “True”. Then scroll to the next item, network.http.pipelining.maxrequests. Double click there (It’ll show a small factor, like 50 or something). Change it to at least 150. One article I saw said to change it to 999999. I changed mine to 150 and the speed increased wonderfully. I’m going to change it to 300 and see what happens. But 999999 seems to me like it’s not necessary and might even cause trouble. Any way, when you’ve done the above then restart Firefox. This has worked great for me. Of course, if you Google ‘how can I speed up Firefox?’, you’ll probably find the similar procedure above.

  2. Hi,

    Thanks for the data. Although there is some controversy on the effects of that tweak, there is an additional step to it. Select any of the “browsers” category settings and do a right-click. Select “New” followed by “Integer”. There is a small pop-up box which requires you to enter the preference name. Just type in “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″ in a subsequent pop-up box. This signifies to the browser to act immediately on the information it receives without waiting for any lapse of time.

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