thought id post this here for anyone using firefox (you may or may not be aware of these settings).

to get to the settings in question, open firefox, and type about:config (no space - this board does funny things sometimes) in the address bar.

this will bring up a long list of settings. some of which are available in the gui, some not. the 2 you want to change are;

network.http.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

by double clicking on, and setting network.http.pipelining to true you enable pipelining.

then doublke click network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and change it from 4 (default) to 100. (well, try what you like, mine is on 100).

as far as i can tell this enables firefox to download 100 simultanious files from sites. so... pages with lots of images load much faster.

this has worked great on my machine and has been the biggest speed boost ive seen, apart from making the switch from dial-up to adsl obviously.

just thought id share.

    made a big difference to me too! Thanks for the very useful tip!

      If I remember correctly, network.http.pipelining.maxrequests has a hardcoded maximum of 8.

        yeah... i thought 100 might be a bit far fetched, but the speed improvement is quite noticable.

        i might change it to 8 when i get home, see if it slows.

          about:config
          Add a new integer value
          name it nglayout.initialpaint.delay
          give it a value of 0.

          Stuff will render as soon as it's downloaded, not just when the whole page is complete.

            careful with this one. i remember on some sites that have lots of images but the server is configured to only allow a certain amount of pipelined requests, this can make pages fail to load because the browser is trying to make too many requests and the server wont accept the connections.
            but at a fairly low number it does work well.

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