Mozilla Firefox Slow?

joseph brand · 27-06-2007 6:12pm #1

version2.0.0.4

Recently downloaded this version due to Divx problems with older one. It seems that is slow at starting up (heavy program) and slow at opening webpages. But when i download a file off net it can reach speeds of 400k/s?

anyone else facing similar hassles?

Just wish it could be a nice, small, quick, browser.

aidan_walsh · 27-06-2007 6:15pm

joseph_brand wrote:

Just wish it could be a nice, small, quick, browser.

Which is exactly what its designed to be. Its possible that one of your plugins is out of date and causing the slowdowns?

ethernet · 27-06-2007 10:14pm

It's getting bloated with every release. I'm running three add-ons and using the default theme. You could always try Opera or, dare I even suggest it, Safari for Windows when it's out of beta testing.

8T8 · 28-06-2007 12:12pm

Have you tried clearing out the cache in Firefox and doing a disk defrag might help a little bit or maybe bad extension ?

It's generally not bloat that is the cause of Firefox slow feel to it's UI and startup it's the cross platform nature of the software which means certain optimizations cannot be deployed. Well they could if they really wanted to but would fragment the user base and cause major confusion so they shy away from aggressively optimizing Firefox.

Firefox 3 will have a cross platform OpenGL accelerated renderer which will greatly improve things though perhaps not startup time but for web pages and the UI of Firefox.

If you really want to speed things up you can get CPU optimized builds of Firefox that really add a kick to it's step, the UI is much more responsive and pages are rendered a little faster too.

Now there are a ton of custom builds of Firefox as you can see in the forum, mmoy's are quite impressive but spell checking is broken in his latest releases so the one to go for is tete009's builds.

Here is what to do go to his site download his Firefox 2.0.0.4 build (Visual C++ 2005 SP1 (PGO) SSE).

Download the Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86) also linked on their and install that first.

Now depending on the CPU and whether it has SSE, SSE2 or SSE3 download the appropriate DLL file and place it in the Firefox folder overwriting the current one. There are also beta SSE DLL's a little further down the page that may be also worth trying. {If you have a Core 2 then get the SSE3 DLL or if a P4 get the SSE2 if not sure what is supported use CPU-Z to find out}

I also strongly recommend starting with a fresh profile and not using your current one so you will have to delete that beforehand. If all goes well you should definitely notice a significant improvement to Firefox responsiveness in general.

[As custom Firefox builds are not allowed use the official branding which if you happen to like you can easily change that, use the Fire-something extension to change the title bar to Mozilla Firefox, in the extension properties delete everything under prefix & names then just add Firefox to prefixes, also tick the box for single name mode. Secondly in the address bar type in about:config then scroll down to general.user.agent.firefox and change from Bon Echo/2.0.0.4 to Mozilla Firefox/2.0.0.4 this isn't really needed but some sites may act weird if they don't see the Firefox name in the user agent string. Thirdly if the icon bothers you this is also changeable via Microangelo which can replace the icons in the Firefox.exe with the ones from the official Firefox.exe via the librarian segment of the software]