No doubt Firefox 3 has been optimized a lot for speed but over time with regular usage, it gets a lot slower as compared to a fresh installation. With time, Firefox also starts taking a lot of time to start which is quite annoying.

Here are three simple tricks to speed up Firefox and have a more satisfying browsing experience with your favorite browser.

1. Disable unused Add-ons

We all love Firefox add-ons as they are one of the main reasons for its popularity. But as we go on increasing the number of add-ons, the start up time for Firefox also starts increasing.

Hardly we use all of the installed add-ons regularly, so you can disable those add-ons which are not regularly used via Add-ons management panel(Tools > Add-ons).

Reducing the number of add-ons will help reduce the start up time of Firefox.

2. Use HTTP Pipelining

HTTP 1.1 protocol allows to use pipelining to speed up transfer of data from server to client(browser). Pipelining is not enabled by default in Firefox 3 which you can enable if you have a good internet connection. If you are on a slower connection like  dial-up this technique won’t make a difference.

To enable Pipelining, type about:config in address bar and press Enter. After confirmation search for network.http.pipelining and double click on it to set it to true. Also double click on network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and set its value as 8.

Restart Firefox and now open some heavy website and notice the difference in speed.

3. Speed Up Page Display Time

Firefox has a default setting so that it starts rendering html content only after a fixed time interval. You can set that interval to zero by creating a key in about:config to reduce the intial delay between entering a url and display of page.

Right click anywhere in about:config page and create a new  integer preference. Type nglayout.initialpaint.delay as preference name and set its value as 0.

With this setting the page rendering time will reduce a bit but this does take a toll on total page load time. Useful only if you want pages to display faster once you enter url.

What tricks you use to speed up Firefox? Let us know in comments.