Turn off ipv6 so firefox loads pages faster

By default Firefox (and other Mozilla-compatible browsers) first tries to use IPv6 before it tries IPv4. This can create unnecessary delays in loading pages if your Internet connection doesn't support IPv6. To make Firefox use only IPv4 you can type "about:config" (without quotes) to the address space in Firefox, hit Enter and scroll down the page until you see this line:

network.dns.disableIPv6

Right-click the line and toggle its value from "false" to "true".

If you want to turn off IPv6 system-wide, this can be done in /etc/modutils/aliases — just find the following line and remove the # character from the beginning of the line:

# alias net-pf-10 off # IPv6

I did both and I find that Firefox now loads pages considerably faster. :)

documented on: 2005.08.27