June 18, 2008 4:59 PM PDT

Speed up Firefox page display time

Here's a quick tip to increase page render speeds in Firefox. If you get confused, you can watch this tip on video at CNET TV.

As with most of these tricks, you'll need to head on into about:config.

The new Firefox 3 gives you a little warning when you go there and I will too. You need to be aware that messing about in about:config can destabilize Firefox. There, you've been warned. Now the fun part. Making your own strings.

By default, Firefox waits 250 milliseconds before it begins displaying a page. We can change that.

Right click anywhere in the about:config page area

Select "New" and "String".

Type nglayout.initialpaint.delay in the box press enter.

Then type 0.

This reduces the wait time to 0.

Mozilla recommends you also create content.notify.interval and set it to match with the nglayout value.

This will make pages start to appear faster, but remember it will increase the overall page load time, since you're starting the page display earlier.

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