If you’ve been using Firefox for a
long time, you may have noticed it getting slower as time passed. Maybe
it takes a few seconds to start up or takes a bit longer loading
webpages. You might start noticing that it takes a second or so to
switch between tabs or that the menu option doesn’t pop up instantly.
If your installation of Firefox runs slow or freezes more than you’d
care for, there are a lot of different ways to speed things up a bit. In
this article, I’m going to go through all the tips and tricks I’ve
learned over the years to keep Firefox fast and efficient. Depending on
your operating system and system configuration, some tweaks might give
you more of a boost than others.
Note that some tweaks require changing the browser settings in
about:config. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read my previous post on
backing up and modifying the about:config configuration in Firefox.
Enable HTTP Cache
There is a new HTTP cache option that can be enabled in Firefox,
which will help reduce UI glitches and various other browser crashes.
Open about:config and search for the following entry:
browser.cache.use_new_backend
Double-click on it and change the value from
0 to
1.
You can then simply close the about:config tab and continue browsing.
There is no need to restart the browser or computer, etc. The new cache
will be enabled and you should get a speed boost and a smoother browsing
experience.
Refresh Firefox
Firefox has a really cool feature that basically performs an
automatic tune up on your Firefox installation. However, you only want
to do this after you understand exactly what it does. Firstly, it will
keep your browsing history, bookmarks, passwords, cookies, website
auto-fill info and personal dictionary.
It will delete extensions and themes, website permissions, added
search engines, download history, security settings, plugin settings,
toolbar customizations, user styles and social feature. To get to it,
you have to type in
about:support in the address bar.
Click on the
Refresh Firefox button at the top right
to get started. I have used this feature a several times and it works
great. It does take a bit of time reinstalling a few add-ons, but I’ve
found that it helps me get rid of the add-ons I never used in the first
place.
Enable Safe Mode
Firefox has a nice feature called Safe mode that disables extensions
and themes in order to determine whether an extension is causing
problems. Since Firefox is all about extensions, you’ll definitely run
into some with poorly written code that can cause a lot of grief.
If you find that browsing in safe mode is super fast compared to
normal browsing, then you can almost guarantee that it’s an extension
causing the slowdown. You can restart Firefox in safe mode by clicking
on the menu icon and then clicking on the help icon.
Now choose
Restart with Add-ons Disabled to get into safe mode.
Safe mode will also turn off hardware acceleration and will reset
toolbar and button customizations. Everything will go back to normal
when you restart Firefox normally so don’t think you’ve lost any
customizations you might have made.
Also, when you restart, it’ll ask you to
Start in Safe Mode or
Refresh Firefox, which is the the other tip I already mentioned above.
It’s best to disable all add-ons and then enable them one by one to
see which one is causing Firefox to slow down, freeze or crash. You can
see all the add-ons and plugins by clicking on the Firefox menu and
clicking on
Add-ons.
The more add-ons and plugins you disable or delete, the faster Firefox will run. Some plugins will be set to
Ask to Activate, which is ok. You want to check all the ones that are set to
Always Activate and see which ones can be switched to Ask to Activate.
Minimize Memory Usage
Firefox has quite a few of these built-in performance tricks and
another one is to minimize the memory usage. Go ahead and type in
about:memory into the address bar and you can get detailed memory usage information about Firefox.
You’ll see a button under
Free Memory called
Minimize memory usage.
Click on that and it will try to free up memory immediately and
therefore make Firefox run faster. This is a good option to use if you
had a bunch of tabs open in Firefox and you recently closed out a lot of
them. Any memory being previously held by those tabs and still being
used by Firefox will be freed.
Clear Cache
Another easy way to make Firefox faster is to periodically clear the
cache. By default, Firefox will cache the contents of most websites you
visit, so that they load faster when you visit them again. In the short
term, this works well and does speed up browsing, however, once the
cache becomes very large, it can start to slow things down.
If you click on the Firefox menu, click
Options and then click on
Advanced, you’ll see a
Network tab that lets you clear the cache.
I don’t suggest clearing the cache very often, as that will slow down
browsing. The best thing to do is to check every few months or to check
the
Override automatic cache management box and set
the value depending on what type of hard drive you have. Since this
cache is accessed via disk, it can be pretty slow if you have a slow
hard drive.
However, if you have an extremely fast SSD drive, then using the
cache can be more beneficial. So keep it small (<250 a="" alone="" and="" disk.="" drive="" fast="" hard="" have="" if="" is="" it="" leave="" mb="" p="" slow="" very="" you="">
Firefox Pipelining
If you have used Firefox for a long time, you have probably come
across this hack on many blogs. Pipelining is a feature that basically
lets Firefox open multiple connections to a server, theoretically
loading pages faster. I’ve had mixed results with this setting, so it’s
best to test it yourself first to see whether it’s worth keeping
enabled.
There are different views on what value should be set for the max
number of connections, but the consensus from most diehard Firefox fans
is 8. In order to enable pipelining, go to about:config and type in
network.http.pipe in the filter box and you’ll see several settings.
The values you need to change are shown in the image above. I have also listed them below if it’s not clear.
network.http.pipelining – true
network.http.pipelining.aggressive – true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests – 8
network.http.pipelining.ssl – true
Other Settings
There are a couple of more obscure settings that could possibly speed
up your Firefox browsing, but results are not guaranteed. It’s best to
test these and see if there is any noticeable difference.
network.dns.disableIPv6 – true
browser.tabs.animate – false
browser.display.show_image_placeholders – false
Hopefully, your installation of Firefox is running a bit faster. I
don’t recommend using add-ons like FasterFox because they only change
the settings we have talked about above and adding more add-ons to speed
up Firefox just doesn’t make any sense. If you have your own tip for
speeding up Firefox, let us know in the comments. Enjoy!
