Quote Originally Posted by Conan
After experimenting with various builds of Firefox, I've figured out how to get it to run just as fast as IE! These settings may put additional load on web sites though.

Type in the Address Bar; about:config

Then scroll over to the following settings and adjust:

network.http.max-connections :40
network.http.max-connections-per-server :20
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server :20
network.http.pipelining :True
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests :32
network.http.proxy.pipelining :True

Close and relaunch browser and watch it fly!
The best tuning for Firefox depends on the global system speed and the network connection speed, so the only way to find it is by attempts.
Anyway you must consider the correct range of each value you want to change. As example
Code:
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests :32
has no meaning because this variable accepts only values from 1 to NS_HTTP_MAX_PIPELINED_REQUESTS, which is set to 8 (see nsHttp.h file in Firefox source).

Currently I'm using these settings:
Code:
network.http.max-connections : 48
network.http.max-connections-per-server : 20
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy : 8
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server : 16
network.http.pipelining : true
network.http.pipelining.firstrequest : true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests : 8
network.http.proxy.pipelining : true
nglayout.initialpaint.delay : 0
plugin.expose_full_path : true	
ui.submenuDelay : 0	
browser.cache.memory.capacity : 65536 (means 64MB)
browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl : true // ATTENTION!!!
browser.xul.error_pages.enabled : true
content.interrupt.parsing : true
content.notify.backoffcount : 5
content.notify.interval : 750000
content.notify.ontimer : true
content.switch.threshold : 750000
content.maxtextrun : 8191
content.max.tokenizing.time : 3000000
signed.applets.codebase_principal_support : true
I hope they work fine for the most of you!