come on. this is so useless. i am running ff3.5 on an intel atom netbook with >10 extensions and i have no problems with it. of course, it needs its time to start. but then it runs fluently. nor does it eat more than 150 mb ram. by the way, after it’s been started, it runs the whole day. i dont need it to be start quickly as long as it reacts fast at the afterward user inputs – and it DOES do that.

this senseless and pseudo tips from makeuseof.com are making me think of unsubscribing from your feed.

removing “unused search engines” and closing the download window right after the downloads are finished, are drawing tears on my eyes. what in the world those tips good for? nothing. nada. senseless. jsut showing the quality of your miserable blog. goodbye.

Wow, what a list of optimisation ideas for firefox 3.5! I can’t wait to implement so
e of these options on both my mac / pc setups. Thank you for this!

I actually thought some of these tips were quite useful for me.

I work as a translator and I spend most of my day online, so every single second that I can save is precious (when you add up all of those seconds).

It’s just like those simple tips like “press ALT+TAB to switch windows”… people may think it’s stupid, but you actually save time and optimize your work thanks to tips like those. The less I have to use the mouse, the better. And the fastest my Firefox works, the better.

To sum up, thanks for this info

Thanks for this. I was having a major issue with 3.5 bogging hard for about a minute every time I typed anything into the address bar. One of those fixed that immediately, and it allows me to type or change web addresses in the address bar as it should, now.

Thanks!

As a follow-up of my previous post, I just did some calculations and came up with the result that thanks to time-saving techniques, I “earn” an extra US$100 every month.

If I didn’t use these techniques, I’d earn US$100 less every month…

Time is money

All those raving about this post should giro Bullshitters.com, and if u don’t fins it create one, with your intellect I guess it won’t be that difficult, or would it? Duh!!

can you describe what p1, p2, and p3 builds are?

Oh btw did google pay u to write this post!?

How about cleaning up Firefox internal sqlite database: http://www.gettingclever.com/2008/06/vacuum-your-firefox-3.html

Wow, follow this guide you will make your browser a super firefox. Thanks for sharing this guideline.

oops, what a stunning Firefox tutorial.

@raptrex:

#P2 build is for Athlon XP, Duron 1.1 GHz+, Pentium III ,Celeron 500+ Processors

#P3 build is for AMD Athlon 64, Sempron, Opteron processor family, Intel Pentium 4/D/M, Intel Xeon, Intel Atom, Intel Core processor family, and other modern CPU.

As long as you have a fairly recent computer, you should use the P3 build.

Ultimate guide to speeding up Google Chrome:

1. Install
2. Run

I followed this recommendations and hope my FF get wings. +D Thanks to share!

Absolutely superb guide. Thx!

Good hint about the moving of the Cache. Keeps the primary SSD on my EeePC 901 from filling too fast. Thanks a lot!

Great tutorial, helpful. I have changed my most of the settings acc. to it, and for RSS i subscribe to all by google reader and then subscribe to my google reader feeds via live bookmarks
-

Thanks for this! I’ve tweaked my about:config to death, and somehow I broke the internet. I actually switched to SRWIron because Firefox often crawled to a halt. The settings you recommended seem to have solved the issues! I was really starting to miss some of my extensions, and Chromium’s support for scripts is hit and miss. Much obliged.

i guess it’s a useful guide, but i’d like to see it’s usefulness in effect with a “before and after” test. Nevertheless nice guide!

I have no problem with using firefox, its IE that a totally hate and cannot use. Thanks for the useful post, keep them coming

Very helpful. Bumps the speed up noticeably. Thank you. Ignore the chuckleheads who don’t appreciate your effort.

I have used Minefield the nightly build of firefox from FF2 which was very basic. I soon learn that it was the add-ons that slowed it down, so only install what you need.

Thanks for all the great tips! I appreciate your hard work on these. And as for the idiot named “Chung”–he really needs to change the first two letters of his nick (“Ch”) to a capital “D” as it would fit his mentality better–I’ll spell it out for this idiot Chung–his name should be DUNG! Chung, it is obvious your IQ is a number that is below “room temperature–someone call Chung’s Mom and tell her he needs to be breast fed and get him off her computer.

Thanks a lot for putting all the tricks at one place! I already know the most of them,, and could get hold of the rest! Ignore the retards….that the best thing u can do to keep them away!!

I know this will annoy people, but give Chrome a shot, if you don’t really use Greasemonkey there is few reasons I can think of to stay with FF.

Intel Mac optimized builds: http://www.latko.org/downloads/

The only problem I have with this article is the fact that it shouldn’t have to be written….

Opera 10 and Safari 4 are running at lightspeed compared to sleep-inducing Firefox these days….

3.5 might spell the demise of Firefox – I’m sorry to say. When the Chrome comes out sometime later this year or next, people will realize that speed is the priority of all good browsers – not ridiculous functionality that you’ll never (or rarely) use.

Thanks for this post, very useful. I am using FF3.5 day in, day out, be it for SEO or web development, something Opera or Safari don’t do properly (yet). Until such time comes I will be sure using your guide

Great info! already tried some of these things. Now let me try the new one’s.

very useful. Keep it up.

Even though Chung was a bit rude, he’s completely right! Most of these tips are just downright useless. Tips 3,4,6,7,8 have absolutely NO effect in speeding up Firefox. They only make things more convenient for users who follow this blog author’s way of using firefox. The only tips with any credence are the advanced network tweaks.

I don’t get why people are saying 3.5 is the downfall of firefox. Its the fastest version yet. If they were half as knowledgeable as they claim to be, they’d know that the new Tracemonkey javascript engine makes it load pages way faster than Firefox 3.0. Firefox 3.5 is definitely NOT as fast as Chrome or Safari in terms of pure speed, but the folks at Mozilla are definitely improving it, rather than making it more bloated.

Part of the reason why the Gecko engine isn’t as fast as others, like Webkit, is because its much more than a web rendering engine. It is also a UI software development toolkit. Gecko not only renders websites, but also the Firefox UI as well. There are a lot of new applications that use XUL and Gecko. Take songbird for instance. It is definitely a more complex engine and hence will take time for Mozilla to make it catch up to others. But its definitely getting there.

@Aliman: At least Chung has some valid arguments. You’re just showing your childish behavior. You’re the one who needs to get off this blog.

Nice Tips!!. i only had one of the tweaks done already.which effected alot. but now i am gonna try all of them.FF is probably the fastest browser out there though.

@ chung YOu can go F**K Your self

Chung, Son of a Bitch. Mother fucking ass hole. You and Mother Fucker BEN get off the blog.
Ass Holes, Be mindful of the fact that there are more non-technical people who needs these ideas. Blogs are not targeted for only Engineers and IT people. BEN writes about rendering engine which shows that he is pretty knowledgeable in that area. how can you guys expect that from all people in country?
Think before you write shit or rude comments.
Makes Sense ???????????????

Awesome Guide! Thanks

Nice Ben! It’s people like you who help us avoid unnecessarily excess tweaking. Not to mention we learn a little, here and there.

The commenter ‘hi’ above is a little harsh. I think Ben’s expertise in the subject matter would at least be a benefit rather than produce any harm. I mean, why would ANYONE want to waste time on tips that you really don’t need?

You need to learn some manners.

Any idea how to tweak Firefox for the Intel Atom pocessor?

I’m on a netbook running Ubuntu 9.04. Have looked into Swiftfox but it seems there’s no build for the Atom processor.

(Very good article btw.)

Here is my ‘even better way’ to make Firefox faster.

*Ununstall Firefox
*Install Opera
*???
*Profit

Thank you for the tips!

I sped up Firefox by using Chrome.

These tips made my FF slower.

I really like the high tension of the flame warriors on this particular blargh post. I’m guessing sexual repression is to blame for the angry nerds.

Hi Mahendra,

thanks for the large collection of tweak tips..

also congrats on hitting digg cover.

besides that as you can see 49 or so comments on your blog and still around 211 comments on your digg post.

I would suggest using backtype plugin to wordpress so that you can pull all the comments at one place.

Hi,

First of all good work in compiling all these tips..

second congrats on reaching digg home page.

and last but not least.

I suggest you use backtype wordpress plugin to get the digg comments also on this post…

Hope that helps.

Thanks for these useful tips.
I usually deselect the check for updates option.

options – Advanced – Update – Automatically check for updates

Another option that make my browsing faster is eselecting the Load images automatically option from Content tab.

lol… 3.5 is fast. The tweaks do help but 3.5 is pretty damn fast compared to 3.0
This coming from testing on a page with about 8000 DOM elements. Grow up ppl and stop calling each other names. Do you need to do that to prove your point?

Oh… its an amazing guide… must read for a Firefox user…

Chrome.

Re Chrome:

I agree, it’s a very promising project. On my machine it’s faster and more stable than Firefox. I need my addons, though, so making a complete switch to Chrome is not (yet) an option.

Will follow this project though, it’s progressing very fast.

I’ll admit that it’s a good collection of tips and tweaks, but there should have been explanations for each one describing how and why the suggested settings will increase performance.

I wouldn’t recommend to anyone to just blindly alter Firefox’s default settings without them having the knowledge of how it will affect the functionality of Firefox especially about:config settings.

Add-ons are the biggest factors that affects Firefox’s performance. Firefox out of the box in its default state starts up, loads, and renders very fast.
If it didn’t, then the turnover rate at Mozilla would be really high.

I’m not necessarily trashing this post because like I said, it’s a good list (could have been a great one had descriptions been added), but the fact is that the lighter something is, the faster it will be so this post primarily suggesting removing features and decreasing the functionality of Firefox is saying just that, make Firefox lighter and it will be faster.
And if that is the way to go, and people want a lighter, faster(?) browser with less functionality, features, and add-ons, then perhaps they should use Chrome.

One more point.
Assigning an external program a task that Firefox typically handles (viewing PDF’s etc) is just an illusion of increased performance and time saving considering that a person needs to launch a whole other program to handle the task that Firefox normally would have.

Finally, this site should really consider using keyword filtering in the comments.
It really reflects as poorly on the site as it does the idiot who is posting trash when a visitor comes here and reads what is highly offense and inappropriate content. Or at the very least, get a moderator.

What would be nice is a little extension to tell you what overhead each extension adds to FF, including how much it adds to the startup time.

Well,they have to fix their “server not found error” which is irritating me and many of the Firefox fans…

Do u guys know how can i fix this error…i have to refresh 4 to 5 times to get the site load…..

speed is ok for me…is there anyone having that “server not found issue”..

Please reply

@Everyone with ‘Server Not Found’ errors: This is a problem faced by many Firefox 3.5 users. Keep an eye on the Mozilla Support Forum topic about this issue. I think we will have to wait for an official update.

Meanwhile, some users have reported that disabling IPv6 and network pre-fetch (as described in the Advanced Network Settings section in my article) has greatly reduced the problem. As always, your mileage may vary.

as usual from Make Use Of, crackin’.

Big cheers Mahendra

Very good Guide!

Some of the advanced network tweaks you are promoting makes you and the users of them bad internet citizens (netizens). Those values were (I hope) carefully chosen by the Mozilla team so that it would give the best performance without being “harmful” to the servers and other users.

Here’s a list of the settings you shouldn’t touch and why:

- network.http.max-connections-per-server: This will cause problems if the server is receiving a great amount of connections (think a dugg ou slashdotted server). This will restrict access for other users as an HTTP server is configured to have a maximum amount of open connections. If everyone ups their max connections per-server by, let’s say, the double, this will, in theory, halve the maximum concurrent users the server can handle. This will be true with sites with many included content (images, css and scripts).

- network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server: Don’t increment this! It will reuse connections for fetching things, yes it will be faster, but at the expense of hogging more connection slots of the server. See last point for more details.

- network.http.pipelining: This will make use of the persistent connections to ask multiple files at once, this should not harm, but is recommended to be activated only on high latency networks (dial-up, satellites or cellular for examples)

- network.prefetch-next: NO! This is actually harmful and of really bad netiquette! Unless you will always load the first google result, this is a bad behavior as this will increase the load on popular websites and actually skew their viewing statistics.

Anyway, this is all open for interpretation, but a good netizen will never risk hampering the experience of others only for their own pleasure.

Italian version at:

http://www.tecnopassion.com/guida-ottimizzare-velocizzare-firefox.html

Be careful. I tried these about:config tweaks and they slowed down my browser. Couldn’t open up some pages. Went back and undid everything. I think I was able to undo the damage. Firefox is as fast as it’s going to get. Chrome, on the other hand, is on another level. Once Chrome comes up with the extensions, Firefox is going to start sliding.

optimize from time to time sqlite entries and remove the trash inside. its called vacuum by sql lite as by sql known as optimize. 2 ways use sqlite manager in ur profile folder to ran vacuum one by one *.sqlite or download sqlite3.exe from sqlite.org and copy to profile folder, open dos command prompt and type to optimize all: for %i in (*.sqlite) do @echo VACUUM; | sqlite3 %i

Seems like this tutorial has helped me!

Now my firefox loads a bit faster and hangs less on opening new tab

Moreover it loads pages a bit more faster

By the way , can you tell me why cant we set the delay on adding extensions to 0 or say , 1 , how will it affect security?

Whatever , + 1,000 heheehe

Hi,

Thanks a million man. This is a great post. Great commitment & Well explained. I will do exactly what this post says.

I hope that this update will provide me features as the site above mentioned http://www.levoltz.com/2009/07/31/the-best-features-of-firefox-3-5/. I am hoping for the best of results.

Thanks again. This is exactly what I wanted.
I will update you with my results.

Thanks

Maybe I’ll just keep using Chrome. I switched to it when I decided Firefox was becoming way too slow.

You are incorrect about there not being any benefit to removing useless search engines, and also about closing the download window. Granted that the effects of these two particular tweaks are minor, nonetheless, they are a beneficial tweak in the totality of all that was presented.
http://www.softwarefreedown.com

You can also try reducing the history entries and deleting then re-adding add-ons for Firefox 3.5, as described here:

http://windowsfixup.com/2009/07/3-ways-to-speed-up-firefox-3-5/

Shut the fuck up, computer nerds!

Go jerk off

Yep ! Its did excellent.

there are some fantastic addons that would make it even faster
they are the following:

Imglikeopera
bettercache
cachefixer
ghostery
vacuum places improved

I work on an internet cofee, these addons helped me a lot saving some bandwidth and managing the cache in firefox.

by using this addons you could speed up your firefox a 15% more.

remember always to use adblock plus to block ads,save bandwidth and speedup your browsing.

btw: great guide ^^ nice work.

on the tips, to be honest the basic / easy changes as many have all-ready mentioned, are useless other then to sort of clean things up (i.e remove unused search engines, remove unused extensions)… the more indepth changes I didn’t bother with (config/advanced) because well firefox would just adjust those settings themselves in the next launch if it was needed.

if you run firefox stand-alone it runs pretty smooth, but once I install my must have essential collection pack of plug-ins, even limited to a core group that I use on every machine, it has been slowing down dramatically… to where when I type sometimes I have to wait for the computer to catch up with the letters appearing.

My laptop is a fairly new 4gb 320hd windows vista 64 pc. my office desktop which is older tends to run firefox faster/smoother on it (maybe due to my heavy multi-tasking on my personal laptop vs my only for work browsing/usage at the office).

I’ve actually been getting pretty dissapointed with the memory firefox uses when left open with multiple tabs for long lengths of time…that is one thing that needs to be fixed like for example if it could be set to “refresh” the page automatically say every 20-30minutes so it’s not using all that memory…I’m awaiting the next release because right now I’ve been loyal since day one of mozilla but getting very tempted to switch to opera

doesnt fasterfox take care of most of the about:config tweaks?

Heya,

I am one of those folks that the author wonders about. I don’t comment often, but I am counted amongst the feeds and I am a regular reader, probably more so than some of the folks here who like to show how smart they are by bashing the writer. blah.

I have LOTS of extensions. Nonprofit work requires that you yourself are the SEO, the marketer, the web developer, the reader, and the main pr person (lots and lots of social media). So I have to have lots of extensions.

And these recommendations showed a significant difference.

Thanks!

dont do the dns cache update it screws with the time it takes the page to load

Thanks for your guide…This is useful…Hope for more update…

I used these and it did make a big difference in my browswer speed. I had pages lagging all over the place and I have a fast machine but the web was another story. Now it is really fast. Thanks

Thanks a lot, My firefox is more better now,, your tips decrease the cpu usage of firefox in my pc….

the article is wrong.

first of removing unused search engines ..etc in NOT going to do anything.

and in most cases, increasing your cash size actually SLOWS DOWN your browser. (bigger is not better). leave it at default.

source= computer tech and junkie for 15 years.

PLEASE dont write about stuff you clearly know nothing about.

Hey,

I’m not sure what’s up with all these negative feedbacks here. But I’ve been working with computers now for just over 10 years and I found your guide to be extremely helpful. There are things here I’ve never actually thought about so well done. Firefox now runs a lot better!

Cheers

in fact increasing your DISK cache size helps you to save bandwidth.

and all on this guide is absolutely useful.

why I say that? workin over 5 years on a internet cofee with 30 mid-end pc’s testing various web browsers.

Wow, never seen so much excited activity on the makeuseof comments! Browser wars again? Anyway, nice article, though as some have suggested you perhaps should have indicated what the changes do, since some of the settings are more a matter of personal preference than speed as such.

Wow! That’s GREAT!

Amazing! Thanks for sharing these