Sunday, October 29, 2006

Significant speedup for Firefox

I noticed a tweak for Firefox that enables, what they call, HTTP Pipelining. Basically what this means is that instead of sending HTTP request sequentially, send them in parallel. This feature is disabled by default in Firefox (even in the most recent version, 2.0) probably because it is still (at least since 2004...) an experimental feature but it seems to work very well. I noticed a significant improvement in page loading times. I hope that the Firefox team would enable this feature by default since it shouldn't do any harm even for slower Internet connections and it would be yet another improvement over IE.

It feels like Opera has done this kind of page request from day one and that's why it "feels" different to browse the web with Opera, but in this case, the difference is a positive one.

Here are the instructions for enabling HTTP pipelining: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1299854/posts

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