Techie Thoughts

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.

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.