Make your Firefox load & run faster!

From: The Windows Club July 3, 2010

Mozilla Firefox is a very popular browser but with the passage of time it slows down considerably. It may take a lot of time to load during startup and the overall speed could also be effected. This is a common problem and it occurs largely because of fragmentation of databases.



SpeedyFox is a small utility that fixes this problem with a single click!



Firefox uses SQLITE databases to store lots of its settings. By the time the databases grow and Firefox starts working slowly. SpeedyFox compacts those databases without loosing any data. Databases are optimized to operate faster and are decreased in size.

Firefox Preloader is another utility that is designed to load parts of Mozilla Firefox into memory before it is used, to improve the its startup time.



Firefox Preloader will sit in the system tray from where you can exercise all the options.

Make Firefox up to 3 times faster without any 3rd party tools by TWCF Moderator johnny.rotton may also interest you!

SOURCE

CCleaner has an option to simply delete these compact databases in Firefox, so you don't have to deal with them at all. But I will try this tool out and see what happens. It probably won't be noticed instantly, since I run CCleaner every night anyway. This may be a better way than deleting them altogether. But I did notice Firefox starting up slowly a few months back, the tool in CCleaner was suggested to me, back when all I had was XP Pro.

You might be interested in this oldie. No claim for originality. I have it saved on my hard disk.

Type about:config in the address bar, and press Enter.

You will be presented with a huge range of options.
This are the tips I have. I am not an enthusiastic Firefox user, so have not tried many of them. Certainly none over, about, the past year!

Load web pages faster: Speed-up Firefox:
"Broadband : 128kbps to 512 kbps"

network.http.max-connections -> 28
network.http.max-connections-per-server -> 16
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy -> 16
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server -> 16
network.http.pipelining -> true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests -> 24
network.http.proxy.pipelining -> true
network.http.redirection-limit -> 8
network.http.request.max-start-delay -> 0

"Broadband : > 512 kbps"

network.http.max-connections -> 48
network.http.max-connections-per-server -> 24
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy -> 24
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server -> 24
network.http.pipelining -> true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests -> 32
network.http.proxy.pipelining -> true
network.http.redirection-limit -> 8
network.http.request.max-start-delay -> 0

Reduce Memory Usage:
Firefox caches data that it fetches from the webpages. There are two types of cache :
a) disk cache
b) memory cache
To view the cache type: about:cache
Disk cache speeds up loading of webpages since FireFox already has the Images, Flash & other media types stored in the disk. So it will load only the new changes in the webpage and the remainder it will load from the disk cache. So leave disk-cache as it is.
The Memory Cache also speeds things up like faster loading of webpages,
but at the cost of memory!! So if you browse lots of webpages with high-resolution Images & media, Firefox slowly eats up memory & more memory until the O.S slows almost to a standstill.!
System becomes very slow, there is solution but only to reboot the System, or free memory using third party software.
To reduce memory usage of Firefox, change the following Preference name value.
browser.cache.memory.enable -> false

Force Firefox to open the link in the same Window:

browser.link.open_newwindow -> 1
This also reduces memory usage considerably. If Firefox opens up new Window(forced to).It will consume more memory & make it difficult to switch between multiple windows.

Block Annoying Image Ads:
permissions.default.image -> 3

Enable Auto-completion:
By enabling auto-completion , you need not type the entire URL of the website.Just start typing a few characters,

browser.urlbar.autoFill -> true

Enable Spell-checking:
spellchecker.dictionary -> en_US

Increase Font-size:
If you viewing a webpage in a 17" monitor or higher then you'll notice that the fonts are so small.It's becomes difficult to read webpages!! One way to overcome this is by : From the Firefox menu "View"-> "Text Size"->" Increase" or "Ctrl++" But these changes won't persist!!! To overcome this, from the menu "Edit" -> "Preferences" From the "FireFox Preferences" dialog, click on the tab 'Content' In 'Font & Colors' click on 'Advanced' This opens up the "Fonts" dialog. Here next to label 'Monospace', set the 'Size' as '14' and also set the 'Mimimum font size' as '14'. Click on 'OK' button.

Get rid of annoying security dialogs:
Every time when you login to webpage like GMail, Yahoo, HotMail Banking sites & other Secure sites, Firefox displays a annoying warning dialog "You are entering a secure site", "You are leaving a secure site" & so on.To get rid
of these irritants, do the following:

security.warn_entering_secure -> false
security.warn_entering_secure.show_once -> false
security.warn_entering_weak -> false
security.warn_entering_weak.show_once -> false
security.warn_leaving_secure -> false
security.warn_leaving_secure.show_once -> false
security.warn_submit_insecure -> false
security.warn_submit_insecure.show_once -> false
security.warn_viewing_mixed -> false
security.warn_viewing_mixed.show_once -> false
To view the Plugins installed:
Type aboutlugins
NOTE: Apply these changes , you need to 'Quit' Firefox & restart

Changing the network settings in about:config has always resulted in less reliable browsing for me. I don't know why.

I used the first three tweaks from this site and it sped up Firefox 3.6.6

Interesting FF tweaks davehc, thank you, but this one removes the PNG images from this post, where Nibiru2012 shows a screenshot of SpeedyFox and Firefox Preloader ...

Block Annoying Image Ads: permissions.default.image -> 3

As I stated, I have not tried many of them, and not for a while. But, frankly, isn't that what you would expect such a tip to do?

No disrespect intended..but no I would not. What is considered "annoying ads" to some is acceptable to others. In this case, I wanted to look at the SpeedyFirefox and Firefox Preloader images, which I don't consider to be ads in the conventional sense, but after I applied the tweak, I could not. No big deal. I adjusted the setting back to the default value of 1. I enjoy tweaking about:config settings to a degree, but I always chronicle what I do, so if there's any issue, I can change it back.

Maybe it is just a matter of semantics.
The author probably found all Image Ads annoying?

Most people find ads annoying, regardless of their form. It's not at all abnormal for discussions about browser tweaking to include something about blocking ads.