firefox
Tech Tip: Speed up Firefox and Safari
Firefox and Safari are both wonderful browers. They are fast, elegant, and most importantly standards compliant (*cough* Internet Explorer *cough*) but did you know that you can make them BETTER? First off Firefox has a couple tweaks that will speed up your web page loading times dramatically with a hidden feature called pipelining. Pipelining increases the amount of concurrent connections your browser has with a webserver and allows it to load content without waiting for any previous content to finish downloading. While this seems a bit confusing, the bottom line is: FAST.
You have no ability to alter the pipelining preferences in Safari, unfortunately, but to enable pipelining in Firefox…
1. Type ‘about:config‘ in your address bar and hit return.
about:config
Careful!
2. Type the word ‘pipelining‘ into the ‘Filter’ field.
3. Doubleclick ‘network.http.pipelining‘ and ‘network.http.proxy.pipelining‘ to set their values to ‘true’
4. Doubleclick ‘network.http.pipelining.maxrequests‘ and set the value to something like 8 (NOTE: if you make this number too high it can end up slowing down your browser and putting a heavy load on the web server. Be considerate 
).
Settings
You have enabled pipelining! But theres more. Browers have a built in delay that it will wait to draw the website on your display. They do this so all the website content (hopefully) loads at once and to make sure the stylesheet is downloaded so you don’t see an ustyled website. While this can be nice, I prefer to see whatever content I can as quickly as possible. To turn this delay off in Firefox:
1. Hold down the control key and click anywhere in about:config
2. Select New -> Integer from the pop-up menu.
3. Enter ‘nglayout.initialpaint.delay‘ as the preference name and click ok.
4. Enter the number 0 as the integer value and click ok.
In Safari:
1. Quit Safari (Safari must not be open during these steps so copy and paste these directions into TextEdit or another word processor).
1. Open the ‘Terminal‘ application in your Utilities folder located in your Applications folder.
2. Copy and paste the following ‘defaults write com.apple.safari WebKitInitialTimedLayoutDelay 0.1‘
3. Hit return
Enjoy your new, fast, browser!