Can we really optimize Firefox to get more speed?

There are many articles and tools which promise to increase your browsing speed. Well, I usually don't like spending too much time on this but today I decided to try a small tool and show you the results. I'm sure the guys at TotalIdea did a good job looking for ways to improve our browsing speed if we use their freeware application so I didn't spend more time looking for something else.

So, FineTune (1.1.3) will offer you 5 presets for Firefox performance optimization and the idea was to measure real page loading time (htms, css, images, flash, ads) for a few popular websites (DIGG, CNN, NBA, W3C, FreeImages). To do this I used a free service offered by Numion. As you can see in the chart below no optimization resulted in a noticeable performance gain so I advice you to work with your browser default settings.

For this test I used a AthlonXP 2600+ machine with 512MB RAM, Firefox 2.0 and a 256Kb/s internet connection. Before each test I cleared browser's cache using "Tools > Clear Private Data...". I'm sure this test can lead to different results for other configurations so feel free to post comments with your own results/suggestions. The "y" value of the chart is page load time so lower is better. The red series use values measured for Internet Explorer 6.0.

Conclusion: Don't waste your time to make Firefox load pages faster. It already does it's best by default!