15 must-have Firefox tricks

3. Speed up Firefox with pipelining

Here's a simple way to speed up Web browsing with Firefox -- turn on its hidden pipelining feature. When you turn on pipelining, you send several requests to a Web server at a time, rather than sending them one by one, so you can load multiple items on a page concurrently. By default, pipelining is turned off in Firefox, but it's easy to turn it on:

1. Type about:config into your address bar and hit Enter.
2. In the Filter text box, at the top of the page, type network.http. A list of settings appears, as you can see in the nearby figure.
3. Double-click the "network.http.pipelining" setting, to change it to true.
4. Double-click the "network.http.proxy.pipelining" setting, to change it to true.
5. Double-click the "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" setting, and in the text box that appears, type in 8 and click OK.

Note that not all Web servers can handle pipelining. If for some reason, you find that your performance suffers with it turned on, reverse the above steps to turn it off.

Using the about:config screen to turn on pipelining and speed up in Firefox. (Click image to see larger view)

4. Use keywords to speed up bookmarks

Visiting your favorite sites using Firefox's bookmarks is far too much of a chore -- do you really want to do all that mousing around? Instead, you can use keywords to instantly jump to any site you've bookmarked. To do it, after you bookmark a site, right-click on the bookmark, select Properties, type in a short keyword (or even just a letter or two) in the keyword field and click OK. Now, to visit the site, type in the keyword in Firefox's address bar, and you'll jump straight to the site.

Adding a keyword to a bookmark. (Click image to see larger view)

5. Hack the Firefox interface with userChrome.css

If you want to do some serious hacking to the Firefox interface, you're going to have to get your hands dirty and edit a file called userChrome.css. This file is a cascading style sheet and contains instructions on how the Firefox interface should display.

	15 must-have Firefox tricks
	Build your own Firefox search engine Use keywords to speed up your searching Speed up Firefox with pipelining Use keywords to speed up bookmarks Hack the Firefox interface with userChrome.css Put your own graphic on the Firefox tool bar Hack the stop, back and forward buttons Move the sidebar to the right	Change the search bar width Remove menu items Protect your privacy when surfing with Firefox Limit Firefox's use of RAM Use Firefox keyboard shortcuts Hack Firefox printing Load a bookmarked Web page in the sidebar