Bijitsu

To peer into the brains of the Firefox browser, type about:config
into the address bar and hit Enter. What follows is a large listing of
the browser's internal configuration options, nearly all of which will
make little sense to the average user. Luckily, Mozilla's all about
online help, tutorials, and forums. We find http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config particularly helpful—check the References links for more details than you can shake a stick at.

One easy, cool preference you
might want to tweak deals with speed. By default, Firefox runs fast
enough—it's like driving at the speed limit. But if you want to push
your browsing experience, modify a few settings in about:config. Note
that these edits are for broadband connections only; if you're still
dialing up, you're stuck with whatever speed you've got.

On the about:config screen, scroll down to the network.http.pipelining
options. The name says it all: Firefox normally processes all HTTP
requests sequentially. Once it sends one out, it waits for a response
before sending the next request to a server. If you set network.http.pipelining and network.http .proxy.pipelining to true then you've basically just upgraded an antiquated browsing system with modern plumbing. Set the network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

option to 30 and Firefox will now send up to 30 HTTP requests at
once—theoretically, although not always, making your browsing that
little bit faster.

Before you close the window, right-click anywhere on the about:config page and select New | Integer. Then type in nglayout.initialpaint.delay
and enter 0 as its value. Firefox will now render pages immediately
instead of waiting its default 250 ms, a slight but noticeable
difference when you're surfing the Web.