Must-Know Techniques for Faster Web Browsing with Leading Browsers; Mozilla Firefox & IE

Though all the browsers are designed to provide users a fast browsing experience; little tweaks here and there can go a long way in increasing the speed of browsers. As attractive an option as it seems, truth be told, in order to make whatever changes we need to improve the speeds of our browsers, we will have to compromise with original registry and browser settings.

Now, this may not be everyone’s cup of tea because modifying the windows registry without proper knowledge may lead on damaging your registry setting, which in turn would seriously affect your Windows Operating System. So, we strongly recommend our readers to backup your Windows registry data before going through any registry changes.

Let’s have a look at some of the leading web browsers regarding how we can optimize their speeds.




Mozilla Firefox

Firefox is generally considered to be the fastest of the browsers available in the market today. If you get to searching, you will find innumerable techniques, many of which can be quite complicated and may lead to data loss. Also most techniques available are for the broadband users. Here, we have not only kept the broadband users in mind but also those who use slower connections like a dialup. In saying so, we have tried to come up with most combinations of computers and the types of connections.

1. Reduce the amount of RAM Firefox uses for it’s cache feature
* Type about:config in the address bar in the browser.
* Click button I’ll be Careful, I promise!
* Enter browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer in filter box
* Set it’s value to 0.
2. Increase the Speed in Which Firefox loads pages
* Type about:config in the address bar in the browser.
* Click button I’ll be Careful, I promise!
* Modify the values for following entries
o Set network.http.pipelining to true
o Set network.http.proxy.pipelining to true
o Set network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to 12 or more depending upon your internet connection speed
* At last, right-click anywhere and select New > Integer. Name it nglayout.initialpaint.delay and set its value to 0.
3. Reduce RAM usage to 10mb when Firefox is minimized
* Type in about:config and then press Enter.
* Click button I’ll be Careful, I promise!
* Right Click in the page and select New > Boolean.
* In the box that pops up enter config.trim_on_minimize and Press Enter.
* Now select True and then press Enter.
* Restart Firefox.
4. Optional Configurations

Optionally here are some more options for your about:config (you might have to create some of these entries by Right Click –> New– > Integer (value 0 & 5) or String (for true & false)
* Create network.dns.disableIPv6 and set it to false
* Create content.notify.backoffcount and set it to 5
* Create plugin.expose_full_path and set it to true
* Create ui.submenuDelay and set it to 0

Internet Explorer

1. Increase the number of simultaneous HTTP connections & downloads that IE makes to a Web server

Internet Explorer 8 limits you to download one to six simultaneous downloads depending upon your internet connection speeds and Internet Explorer 7 and it’s earlier versions limits that number to one to two simultaneous downloads. If you have broadband internet connectivity, changing these setting will increase your Internet Explorer speed and browsing experience. Those setting for simultaneous downloads can be increased maximum of 16 connections by making changes on registry settings.

There is a “Microsoft Fix It” tool that will automatically fix this issue and increase the number of files that you can download at one time to 10.

2. Turn off Phishing Filter

Phishing filter is a feature that supposedly avoids tour system from accessing a website that disguises as an original website but isn’t so. This feature of Internet Explorer 7 will help you to protect from online phishing scams but this feature while enabled will slow down the loading time and speed of the web pages.

This feature can be disabled on IE7 from:

Tools > Phishing Filter > Turn off automatic website checking, there turn it off.
3. Turn off automatic checking for RSS feeds

Usually happens with IE7 and is known to reduce the speed of browser. This feature can be disabled on IE7 from if you really don’t use it:

Tools > Internet Options > Content > Feeds > Settings > Uncheck all the boxes shown there.
4. Turn Off Clear Type

“Clear Type” will render your texts in browser smoothly but there were a lot of people who doesn’t like this kind of font smoothing and using this feature obviously will use your system memory more than that of normal. So if you want to disable it:
* Open IE7
* Open Tool Menu
* Click Internet Options
* Click Advanced Tabs
* Under Multimedia, clear the Use ClearType or Always use ClearType for HTML checkbox
* Click Ok

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