Ever been running a complex script and have firefox alert you every 10 seconds or so, just to let you know that a script is running and would you like it to continue?

A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script right now, or you can continue to see if it completes.

It does get quite annoying sometimes, considerably when without the pop ups the script would take half the time to execute. Obviously there are benefits to keeping this quite low for security reasons, on the otherhand if you just want to increase it a little here is how you do it along with other useful tips and tweaks :

dom.max_script_runtime 

Type  about:config into Firefox address bar and press Enter. You will now see a full list of all the customisable features. Scroll down to the key named dom.max_script_runtime, double click on the row or right click and select modify to change the value.

By default it is set to 10, I recommend changing it to at least 60. That’s it, you don’t even need to close down Firefox for it to come into play.

network.http.pipelining

Firefox is generally considered quite a fast browser. However this tweak could make it even better by allowing several requests for the same page to occur similtaneously. Each call will request a different part of the page and Firefox will patch it together and return the page quicker than before. To do this you need to find the key network.http.pipelining and change the value to true, and also set network.http.proxy.pipelining to true as well just in case and finally set network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to anything greater than 4, but less than or equal to 8. This is the actual number of requests it will fire out but it is capped at 8 as specified by the standards.

network.prefetch-next

Another weird, some may say wonderful, feature of Firefox is that it prefetches some pages by presuming you will go there next. How it works out which ones is a mystery but logically it probably looks at links to pages quite near the top of your current page and start prefetching them in order to speed up the next click page load. This does come at a cost however and uses up some bandwidth too. You can disable this quite simply by setting network.prefetch-next to false.

browser.tabs.closeButtons

This is the level of customisation that I like, you can choose which tabs you want close buttons on. The following shows the effects :

browser.tabs.closeButtons  0  -  Displays a close button only on the active tab
browser.tabs.closeButtons  1  -  Displays a close button on all the tabs
browser.tabs.closeButtons  2  -  No Close buttons (?!?)
browser.tabs.closeButtons  4  -  Displays a single close button at the far right of the tab strip.

There are many other little tweaks for instance getting rid of the go button (or arrow), set browser.urlbar.hideGoButton to true. However the best thing to do is scan down the list looking at the names, see anything interesting just paste into a search engine and someone will have documented it somewhere, most likely Mozilla. It is a bit like Window’s registry, just be careful with the values you do change and if something doesn’t work just reset the value by right clicking on the key and selecting reset. It’s easy to see the ones you have changed as they are highlighted in bold text.  Have fun…

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