A quick-and-dirty way to speed up Firefox (a lot)
Summary: Browsing speed will improve from intolerable to moderately tolerable. And that's about all you can ask from Firefox these days.
I can see sjvn chortling over there, reading this post. I can hear him thinking, "I'll show you how to speed up Firefox. It's simple: run Chrome."
See also: Firefox 11 review: Firefox has jumped the shark
See also: Chrome: The people’s Web browser choice
He's probably right, but there are things about Chrome that annoy me, and I haven't taken the time to really get to know Chrome and make it a friend. Firefox is still my daily driver.
The Firefox we had running on our media PC had slowed to an unbearable, unusable crawl. Yes, I can hear some of you out there. That's how Firefox usually is. Funny.
The point is, it was moderately usable last week and completely unbearable this week. The further point is, I found a way to speed it up. Now, you want to settle down over there for a minute and listen? This might actually help you.
Diagnosing the problem
My wife and I share the media PC, which we use when watching the big screen from the couch, so we each have a Firefox profile. When either of us launches Firefox, we get a simple dialog asking us to choose our profile. After a day or so struggling with a completely bogged down Firefox, I realized my wife hadn't been complaining.
I launched her profile (her background is flowers, mine is a more dignified gray), took Firefox to my usual morning reading sites (ZDNet, TechMeme, Drudge, Google News, etc.) and found that using her profile, I didn't experience the bogged-down effect I did when running my profile. Sure, pages slowed whenever anyone ran some big third party ads or other obnoxious detritus of the modern age, but in general, her Firefox ran relatively well.
So I did what I recommend to others to do. I turned off browser extensions in my profile. No difference. My Firefox was still dog slow.
Finally, I decided to try the nuclear option. I created an entirely new profile.
Once I launched into that new profile, everything ran far better. I could visit my morning reading sites and they actually loaded (they were normal-Firefox-slow, but not unbearable-Firefox-slow).
Next, rather than copying my extensions over from the old profile, I downloaded them from the Firefox add-ons page. Firefox performance was still good.
I realized later that while I'd disabled and tested extensions many times, my actual Firefox profile was probably a good three years old. It's been in continuous use since Firefox 3.5 or 3.6. Sure, I'd updated my extensions, deleted some, and otherwise done Firefox maintenance, but I've never completely started fresh, with a completely fresh profile.
And that was the ticket. So if you want a quick-and-dirty way to run Firefox faster, create a blank profile, don't copy anything over from the older profile (I use XMarks for bookmarks, so I just downloaded a fresh set from the server), and download your extensions fresh as well.
Browsing speed will improve from intolerable to moderately tolerable. And that's about all you can ask from Firefox these days.
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Talkback
Firefox rot?
http://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2010/09/07/fighting-fragmentation-sqlite/
"advanced users on non-Windows platforms who are suffering from fragmentation can manually copy *.sqlite files to another directory and back.
Also from the linked blog article:
"the fragmentation problem isn???t limited to Firefox. Other browsers suffer from it too.
Reorganizing and cleaning Firefox SQL files may help
http://crystalidea.com/speedyfox
73 de w8sdz - Keith
Thanks, it helped me to make FF run faster
Speed wars irrelevant now?
Firefox is not slow
I use chrome regularly and apart from the minor speed difference, i find Chrome to be quite heavy on resources esp. while rendering Flash. Also the extensions in Firefox justifies the additional second or two while loading a page.
the default firefox 14 settings make zdnet scrolling abismally slow
otherwise this build is working much better than the previous ones.
:)
.
On Linux
Next restart of FF will create a directory structure in .mozilla.
Before You Delete Anything Copy Your Passwords
But, before Delete, go to Tools/Options/Security/Show Passwords. Maximize and take a ScreenShot of them, if they're stored there. Printing mine out helped. Because recovering all the passwords one by one that I just deleted presented challenges for my old brain. I use Gadwin PrintScreen for this.
Speed up Firefox?
I run Firefox, IE9, Chrome, and Opera on my systems (have to test our websites on all these to be sure rendering and layouts are OK) and I've never noticed any real slow rendering of sites that I do go to. Now I have seen many a video rendering hang and then run but always due to the servers and internet vagaries.
If I could complain consistently about any of these browsers, it would be Chrome for it's regular and consistent lockups when attempting to play videos (some vids are worse than others) and Opera for it's odd formatting of many .ASPX pages. Oh, and IE versus FF for different font formatting sizes even when the site specifies an exact font.
So exactly where do you get any sort of real "barely tolerable" from?
What barely tolerable means
In other words: pretty much unusable. With this update, it's not still a pain (some pages take FOREVER to load their pile of ads and included Twitter/Facebook widgets, but I can actually get work done. It's still very choppy at times, and compared to page loads on Chrome, a lot slower.
But I find Chrome crashes on me regularly, and I also haven't yet taken time to figure out how to move things around on the Chrome toolbars to make it look and feel how I want it to. That's not Chrome's fault, I've just been too busy to tinker much.
If Firefox takes five minutes or more to load a page
I don't even get twenty second page load times with my laptop at a public internet site most of the time. Sometimes, it breaks half a minute and I go do something else.
run ad-block plus ...
Ludo
This a recent build?
Five minute page loads?
If your name wasn't at the top of the article, I'd have thought you were just ANOTHER tech site pinhead, making crap up because you're favorite browser is (fill in the blank), and it's obviously the coolest. But since you work here, I have to conclude you have no idea what you're talking about. If you can't make your browser work, what could you possible know about computers? What? Tell us. We will keep in mind that you are the only person on the planet that is unable to use Firefox.
I would also suggest you check out some extensions for Firefox, like AdBlock Plus but that would obviously be over your head. Get someone to help you with it.
You column should be titled "I asked my wife and my grandmother how to use my PC, and here's what they said." And it should appear on Cracked.com.
Eliminate all those ads and widgets with NoScript -- It's a 'MUST HAVE'
NoScript out-of-the-box basically disallows all scripts from running on a page, prevents cross-site scripting, and enforces application boundaries. If you want a particular element to run on a page, you have to whitelist it, either temporarily or you may set it permanently. It can be a little bit of a hassle at first, but after you have used it for a while, you will really get used to it and appreciate what it is doing for you.
You would be amazed at how many other page elements are called from other domains from a given web page. Personally, I don't want or need to see all of that crap. I don't need to see a Facebook "like" button or have Google Analytics run on every page I go to. Sorry, SEO's...
The simple speed boost (not to mention the security enhancement) you will see from using this extension is well worth any minor inconvenience you may experience when first starting out with it.
Check out http://noscript.net and read about it for yourself. I, for one, can't say enough good things about it.
-=B
Strange
I'm guessing, since you fixed this with a new FF profile, that the problem was with plugins and extensions.
I'm on FF12 at the moment but all of my FF versions I have used have never been that slow. I have a 50Mbs connection and the web pages load lightning fast.
I wonder if you need to increase pipelining and max-requests in about:config?
Mark
re: What barely tolerable means
Then I strongly suggest that you learn about Ad Blocker Plus. I am typing this on an old H^hDell, with only 512 mb of ram, and although I can have 10 or more pages loading, a page loading time of [b]5 minutes[/b] is something I rarely experience.
Doesn't really sound like a FF issue
The problem with browsers
As for different font sizes and word wrapping, it's due to the newer browsers such as IE9 and Safari doing exact positioning using sub pixels. This means if you specify a point size the new browsers will try and match the number of pixels it converts to exactly, while the older ones will just go to the nearest pixel integer. If you would like your text to display the same on multiple browsers stick to point sizes of 9, 12 and 18 as these will translate to an exact pixel height. This problem will disappear when all browsers can do sub pixel positioning.
The sort of "barely tolerable" David is referring to is likely to be his OS and any other resident software or he might be stuck with a lemon version of FF (easy to do since they seem to churn one out each week).
Hating Firefox, but using it
Lately, crashing became so bad, that FF can not restore latest session normally, so it starts with "session:restore" dialogue, which only about [i]previous[/i] session save, which was like [b]half days[/b] before -- so you loose whatever changes you have made to your opened/closed tabs and such.
I have sent hundreds of failure reports, but those crashes were never fixed. No one at Mozilla even tries to fix them, because otherwise crashes would stop at FFv6,7,8,9, or 11th version.