A co-worker showed me an interesting problem with Firefox today. He loaded a page from our application (running on localhost) and the page content loaded instantly, but the page load itself didn’t end until a time out 20 seconds later. Literally.
Everything we saw a measured from the browser or from the sending application showed that the content was sent in milliseconds, and the page load was just sitting there doing nothing. We were even using the latest Firefox beta.
Other browsers had no such problem.
Turns out, we figured out what was going on using the Tamper Data add-on.
Turns out there was a Connection: keep-alive in the header. When we changed it from keep-alive to close, the browser behaved as expected. That is, it loaded the page instantly.
A little web investigation showed that when you use the keep-alive attribute, you must also use Content-Length: header, which the sending application wasn’t doing.
A quick application tweak to send the content length, and everything ran super spiffy.
Now, if you don’t have access to the application that’s sending you web pages, you can twiddle with the about:config and change the network.http.keep-alive setting to false.
it worked to do about:config and toggle true for network.http.keep-alive
I will turn it on again and be sure its a real fix
thank you
J
“network.http.keep-alive setting to false.” I’m glad you mentioned this! WOW! yes, the sites are slightly hesitant, but not obtuse, in loading. That was why I was looking up on how to fix the problem.
I also rebooted after changing and checking. Still worked fine.
Thanks a bunch for your assistance!
I will pass this along to some of us who use FF, instead of the proprietary IE. We all thought “Buckeye Cable” had internet issues. Now we know better.
My Question after reading your article was:
Where do you actually change this about:config and change the network.http.keep-alive setting to false?
Answer:
“To modify a preference in a browser application such as Firefox or SeaMonkey, type about:config into the Location Bar (address bar) and press Enter.” http://kb.mozillazine.org/Editing_configuration
Thanks.
This tweek got me back to fast. Thank you for the help.
about:config and change the network.http.keep-alive setting to false.
For two weeks I have tried all sorts of suggested tweaks to correct my problem of pages that would start to load in an instant and then either stop altogether or take a good half minute to load in FF. The measuring bar at the bottom of the screen would most often fill in half way and then go no farther. I just made your recommended change and pages are loading in a blink. Hope this continues the way it has begun! Thank you very much. I use a Mac and the problem was the same in both Leopard and Snow Leopard.
This worked like a dream, I have been putting up with Firefox loading my saved session web pages on start up so very slowly. Usually taking up to 5 mins to load them all ( up to 25 different sites on start up)
Thanks you so much for this tip,
Thanks my firefox has been slow for long time…tried everything i could but didn’t seem to work.
Your fix is perfect resolved my issue.
This trick fixed my problem instantly. Thank you so much!
Thank you to everyone who’s leaving posts and sending me email confirming that this tip works for them. I am getting your messages!
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I was about to ditch Firefox for good and transfer to Google chrome or even IE, until this fix. It has seemed to stop pages like ebay and yahoo hanging for minutes while loading. Thanks.
HEY THIS REALLY WORKS!!!!! Viewing media online is sooo much better now. Even buffer times have dramatically been reduced. THANKS!!!!!!! My life is so much easier now.
this helps alot thanks for the tip i would like to give my own tip also go to about:config and change content.interrupt.parsing to false
Followed ur recipe to allow the pages to load faster…bam!! IT WORKS!! My FF load times have been cut in half@@ Nice work Walt~~
Yes, this worked. To make the steps a little bit clearer:
Type “about:config†without the quotation marks in the FireFox address window.
Then, in about:config, type the following into the Filter window (bar actually):
keep
That will bring up several entries, including these two that you may need to change:
network.http.keep-alive
network.http.proxy.keep-alive
These probably both have the value “false.â€
Double click on the entry and to change the value to “true.â€
Restart Firefox and if this was the problem, pages will load quick as can be again.