Slow Loading Website Using Firefox

Here I am finally getting around to dealing with an annoying quirk using Firefox. I have FF10 on three machines all running Windows7 -- two desktops and one laptop. The behavior I am asking about occurs on all three so I believe that rules out a machine dependent problem. One site WTKR.com (Our local TV) loads very slowly. The bottom of the screen shows a multitude of 'Transferring data...' messages and it takes over 7 seconds for it to get rendered. The same thing happens on WVEC.com -- another local TV station but not as slow. All other sites I have come across load almost immediately. If I visit those two sites using Chrome or IE, the come up almost immediately. I have removed or disabled all FF's extension, plugins and even have gone back to several earlier versions of FF, the earliest being 4.0, but they still load slow in each case. If it helps, one thing I noticed in Tool>Page Info for WTKR and WVEC is the first entry which says X-UA Compatible IE7. This entry does not appear in the Page Info for any of the pages that load 'instantly.' Others in the Mozilla Firefox forum report the problem doesn't exist on there Vista machines so I wonder if it is a Firefox vs. Windows 7 issue? I doubt it. Will someone please help me get rid of this annoying quirk? Thank you.

Thank you. I did all the things you suggested in the first part. Will check with my ISP about the X-UA sometime this morning.

Anak said:

Your welcome, in the meantime I am looking for other possibilities.

I already checked this: http://www.wwco.com/~wls/blog/2008/03/28/firefox-slow-page-load-solved/, but my network.http.keep-alive is true with the integer set to 115

To enter about:config just type/copy/paste about:config in the address bar, click on "I'll be careful" then type/copy/paste network.http.keep-alive in the Filter box.

It is an older fix so you have to be careful checking which version of FF they are working with.


EDIT:

I see you have ADSL, this site may help: How to Make Firefox Load Pages Faster: 10 steps (with pictures) - wikiHow - from October 21, 2011, and in my FF10.0.1 all the settings are there, and they match.

In step #6 it suggests to up the network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to 8, but I did not, since I am happy with how my FF works I left the settings alone.

One other suggestion, If you make any changes copy/paste the original settings into any text editor, and save to keep track of them that way you can revert back if the changes make FF run slower....Almost forgot, restart FF just to be sure.

Wow! 'Instant' loading now.

Thank you very much.

Anak said:

Your welcome! Glad you have it sorted out now.

Could you elaborate?

Did you upgrade to FF 10.0.1?
Did you clear the cache, was it the link in my Edit?
Were your settings that far off, some missing?

I went through all the steps in the article and found those recommended to be true were set to false. Corrected those and bumped the maxrequest up to 8. I did clear the cache but after several runs of FF 10.0.1 things are still 'instantaneous' (loosely defined of course.)

Since I did them all in one pass it is hard to tell if anyone of them did the trick but collectively they worked.

Thanks again.