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Firefox is absolutely my favourite web browser in the whole wide world! This is not just due to the many fantastic add-ons that are available but also due to its ease of use. I’m going to show you how a couple of minutes of effort can result in improving the performance of Firefox resulting in quicker page response times. Best of all, you don’t need to be an technical networking ninja to make the changes.

First of all let me introduce you to the concept of “Pipelining”. First lets think about a very simplified example in the form of a web page called test.html with some text and 3 images. Your web browser will need to make a separate HTTP GET request for each object on the page as follows;

A non pipelined request will do all the GET requests in serial;

Step 1: GET test.html
Step 2: GET image1.jpg
Step 3: GET image2.jpg
Step 4: GET image3.jpg

A browser using pipelining will do all the GET requests in parallel resulting in fewer HTTP connections, less latency and less traffic overhead between you and the web server;

Step 1: GET test.html, GET image1.jpg, GET image2.jpg, GET image3.jpg

In Firefox pipelining is not enabled by default. To enable pipelining we have to go beyond the normal Firefox preferences page and get under the covers.

Type “about:config” into the browsers address bar. (don’t include the double quotes) You will see a rather humorous warning message regarding “Dragons”. After promising not to break anything you will be greeted with a billion and one different options to play with.

At the top of the page you will see a “filter” box.
Type “network” into the filter box (don’t include the double quotes) and you will only see options relating to the networking configuration of Firefox.

Scroll down a little and you will find the following settings;
(double clicking will toggle between true and false)

network.http.pipelining – set this to true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests – increase this to 8
network.http.proxy.pipelining – set this to true

Now restart your Firefox browser and Pipelining will be enabled.

Further reading and more in depth details can be found here;
HTTP pipelining at Wikipedia
What is HTTP pipelining at Mozilla

Feel free to comment on this article or get in touch if you would like any further information.