Firefox Pipelining
I just heard a great tip on how to increase the number of connections that Firefox will use when downloading content from a web page. They call this pipelining. What’s almost as interesting as the setting is the method you use to access and change it.
Typing about:config in your address bar brings up this screen. I changed two options, shown in bold and voila!
I’m on the train so I haven’t experienced any performance improvement, if any. We’ll see.
I wonder how IE operates? I was always under the impression that all browsers did this kind of pipelining and I was surprised to find out that I had to turn it on for Firefox.
UPDATE: I got into work and fired up the browser. I went to bloglines.com, gmail.com, tenbyten.org, primordial ooze (of course) and I was pretty much blown away. There is a significant difference in performance.
Why on Earth would they disable this? I suppose it’s because it could seriously degrade a dial-up user’s experience and the Firefox team didn’t want to try and writing a Tuning Wizard or a bandwith detector of some kind.
Anyway, if you’re a Firefox user, you really have to enable this option.