Tweak Camino About:Config

We talk a lot about Safari here at MacTips, but personally my browser of choice is Camino. Imagine Firefox with the sexy Mac look–that’s Camino. Minus most of the cool third party plugins.

Why don’t the third party plugins for Firefox work on Camino? They’re the same Mozilla browser aren’t they? Yes and no. Camino’s interface is built off Cocoa. Firefox is built off XUL. Apparently this is why it’s so hard to make Firefox plugins work for Camino.

So why use it if plugins don’t work for it? It’s fast, elegant and very powerful.

It’s the little things for me. Like how I can tab through a set of form items and actually use my keyboard to change select fields. Give the new Camino 1.5.2 a try.

Even though Firefox plugins don’t work in Camino doesn’t mean other tweaks don’t. Enter about:config in your browser and edit away. Listed below are some popular tweaks:

network.http.max-connections
Changing this will increase the maximum number of connections opened by Camino. The faster connection you’re on the higher this can be. For Cable/DSL 48 should be plenty.

network.http.max-connections-per-server
The maximum number each website can use. I set this value to 16.

network.http.pipelining
Pipelining reduces page loading times by sending multiple requests to the server before it’s received anything back. Not all servers support this–and some behave strangely with this request. Turn to false if it’s behaving strangely–otherwise, turn it to true.

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
The number of requests to send with each pipeline. A value from 1-8. 8 should work fine.

network.prefetch-next
This is a strange one. Camino guesses where you’re going to click next and automatically downloads those pages. It makes the page load faster if you do click the link, but if you don’t it just runs up CPU cycles and bandwidth. I’d leave this one off.

If you have any other suggested changes please let me know in the comments.

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