Hack your Firefox
Firefox is Internet browser which can be used by geeks and standard users. Ever since Internet Explorer 7 was released some of the users have complained about Firefox being resource intensive than Internet Explorer and at times Firefox freezes or shut downs suddenly which is bugging. However, apart from these issues there is no other major issue and the amount of customization available in Firefox makes it a winner in the browser war.
There are some tweaks that can make your surfing experience richer when using Firefox. To customize Firefox you need to change some entries in the advance configuration. Do not get intimidated by the word "advance configuration" it is nothing but a long list of keys and values which can be accessed by typing about:config in the address bar of Firefox. Some of the tweaks which I use are
Limit RAM usage: Since Firefox uses a lot of memory specially if you have been surfing for a long time in the same window this tweak is necessary to improve your browsing experience. Type about:config in the address bar and you would see a list of keys (preference), status (user has set it or the status is default), type (type of value, whether boolean, string or an integer) and their values on the screen. Look for browser.cache.disk.capacity or browser.cache.memory.capacity preference. This command sets the maximum amount of RAM Firefox should use. The value is an integer which has to be changed depending on the RAM available on your computer. For systems with RAM of upto 512 MB you should start with 5000 and for systems with RAM of more than 512 MB start with the 15000 as the value. Use the browser for some time to determine whether the amount of RAM allocated does not affect the browsing experience. If it does change the value to something higher.
Speed up page loading: Once you have the "about:config" window open look for network.http.pipelining, network.http.proxy.pipelining and network.http.pipelining.maxrequests. Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. The network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining would typically be false. Change the value to true (by double clicking) to enable pipelining so that Firefox can send many requests to a web page at a time thus loading pages faster. Look for the value of network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and change it to 30 which allows Firefox to send more requests again helping pages to load faster.
Fetch only pages that you click: Some of the pages, most of them on Google for example, fetch content for those links which it thinks you are most likely to click. This takes up resources of your computer and also the bandwidth. The setting can be changed by looking for network.prefetch-next value and changing the value to false by double clicking. This would stop pages from pulling content from those links which have not been clicked thus reducing resource usage.
These three tricks are the most common and are easy to implement. If you are one of those who would like to go further I would recommend using this link for a complete knowledge of all the keys that are listed on http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_FAQs_:_About:config_Entries in the about:config window.
