Setting hidden Mozilla preferences

Jan 13, '02 02:49:36PM

Contributed by: skyko

Mozilla has some preferences that are not listed in the Preferences panel of the app. Some of them are nevertheless quite useful, most notably (at least to me) the number of network connections that Mozilla will open.

To begin with, type about:config in the URL location field. Mozilla will now generate a page that lists all the prefs it understands and what values they have.

If you scroll down the page, you'll notice the settings that start with network.http. Mozilla uses relatively few concurrent connections per default (24 overall for all windows and 8 per server -- two persistent). Now if you happen to have a rather fast connection to the Internet and/or you are browsing mostly on a Intranet you can get Mozilla to use much more connections (if it needs to, that is).

Read the rest of the article if for the details on how to edit your Mozilla prefs file...

[Editor's note: Please read the comments for an important note about how to crate a new prefs file, as opposed to editing the master!]

First of all you need to find Mozilla's preferences file. Open a Terminal and enter in this command in your home directory:

find . -name prefs.js
You'll get something like
./Library/Mozilla/Profiles/default/zhu3676g.slt/prefs.js
Now you can edit this file (I use the SimpleText that came with the Developer Tools) to include the fillowing lines:
user_pref("network.http.max-connections", 128);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections-per-server", 48);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy", 24);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server", 12);
N.B. the settings above are the equivalent of Thors hammer and will put considerable load on the remote site, but in my case Mozilla loads pages much quicker.

BTW: you can use the following Terminal command to edit your prefs file:
open -a /Developer/Applications/Extras/SimpleText.app/
`find ./Library -name prefs.js`
[Shown on two lines for readability; insert a space between "SimpleText.app" and "`find"]. This will open all prefs.js files in your home directory in SimpleText in one go!

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