Making Firefox faster.
open about:config in a second window.
Change or add the following preferences to the new values shown. If the preference is already set to this value then skip it and move on the next. If the preference does not exist then you need to add it:
browser.display.show_image_placeholders: false
Stops the display of placeholders while images are loading to speed up the page. Default is True
browser.tabs.animate: false
Disables all tab animation features (e.g. when you click the ‘New Tab’ (+) button) to make the tab interface feel quicker. Default is True
network.prefetch-next: true
This allows Firefox to automatically prefetch (load) the contents of pages linked to by the page you are viewing e.g. this website uses prefetch to load the TechLogon homepage in the background, making it quicker for you to view next if you want to 😉
To take advantage of increased speed when browsing websites which use prefetch, keep this setting at the Default which is True.
(Note: some people view prefetch as a possible security risk and disable it. My current view is that it isn’t a major concern – if a site is bad, it will just load bad stuff on the current page anyway without needing to prefetch it from elsewhere. Google Chrome also uses a version of prefetch.)
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server: 8
Increases the maximum number of persistent connections per server which can help speed up loading of multimedia rich sites. Default is 6
network.http.pipelining: true
Can send multiple requests to a server together in order to speed up loading of webpages. This is not supported by ALL servers – some servers may even behave incorrectly if they receive pipelined requests. Default is False
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests: 8
Sets a maximum number of multiple requests that can be pipelined to prevent overloading the server. Higher values will cause a delay before the first request completes but will make the last request complete sooner. Higher values will also cause more of a delay if a connection fails. The maximum value is 8. Default is 4
network.dns.disableIPv6: true
Disables IPv6 DNS lookups to prevent a significant delay with poorly configured IPv6 servers. Default is False
Use RAM-only cache
Firefox can be configured to use only RAM as cache storage. Configuration files, bookmarks, extensions etc. will be written to harddisk/SSD as usual. For this
open about:config in the address bar
set browser.cache.disk.enable to "false" (double click the line)
set browser.cache.memory.enable to "true" (double click the line)
set browser.cache.memory.max_entry_size to the ammount of KB you'd like to spare, to -1 for automatic cache size selection
Main disadvantages of this method are that your tabs won't survive a browser crash, and that you need to configure the settings each user individually. On the other hand on a personal system it probably is the easiest method to implement.