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I like Firefox but it’s not as fast as it used to be. This is a comprehensive, safe guide to optimizing
Firefox 3.5 for speedy browsing. For each suggestion, your mileage may vary. Before you proceed,
create a new profile.
Quit Firefox, run “firefox.exe -profilemanager”, and create a new profile to experiment on. Use the
new profile as your default only if your performance improves. Only those changes needed from a
default installation are mentioned in this guide.
If you’re using Windows, use an optimized build of Firefox 3.5.1 for your processor. Use Swiftfox for
Linux.
Set your homepage to about:blank. Use only must-have extensions with the default theme. Use
Adblock Plus and Flashblock to block unwanted ads and Flash.
In Options->Main, choose a folder for your downloads and save all downloads to it automatically.
Close the download windows automatically when all downloads are finished. Turn off download
history in Options->Privacy, Custom settings for history.
Set PDF files to Save File. Use your favorite PDF reader to separately open them.
Set mailto to use your favorite desktop email client or Gmail/Yahoo webmail account. Sorry,
Windows Live/AOL Mail users!
Change Web Feed from Preview in Firefox to your favorite RSS reader.
In general, open files separately, rather than from within the browser wherever possible.
In Options->Advanced->Network, increase Offline Storage (size of the disk cache) to 150 MB.
In Options->Privacy, use Custom settings for history, and reduce length of remembered history to 15
days.
6. Customize General Advanced Options
In Options->Advanced->General->Accessibility:
Turn off spell checker if you ROTFLMAO on forums and don’t aspire to be a writer. Keep it on
if you’re looking for a job.
Uncheck Always check to see if Firefox is the default browser on startup. On Windows, set
Firefox as your default browser using Program Access and Defaults.
Drop-down In the search box, select Manage Search Engines…, and remove any search engines that
you will never use.
8. Clean up bookmarks, avoid Live Bookmarks
If you have a lot of bookmarks in Firefox, you might have dead links, or even duplicate bookmarks.
Clean them up using the CheckPlaces Firefox extension, and uninstall after you’re done.
Firefox checks Live Bookmarks every hour for updates. Use a dedicated RSS Reader like Google
Reader instead. Delete the preset Latest Headlines Live Bookmark.
If you prefer a nice GUI to tweak advanced settings, use these performance enhancing Firefox
extensions. If you are the DIY type, these optimizations (and many more) are covered in the next
sections.
FasterFox 3.8.1 Lite is an (experimental) add-on that lets you choose from four presets (or
use a custom profile) to optimize Firefox.
Tweak Network 1.3 allows you to choose from Default and Power profiles for tweaking
network settings in Firefox.
The following two sections are advanced Firefox configuration changes that are simple to make.
Enter about:config in the Firefox address bar in an empty tab. Click ‘I’ll be careful, I promise!’. You
can use Firefox’s Safe Mode and select ‘Reset all user preferences to Firefox defaults’ to undo any
changes you make. Also, entries you change are displayed in bold, and can be reset using the right-
click context-menu.
If an entry does not exist, create it by right-clicking on an empty space, selecting New, and choosing
the type of entry as listed.
10. Advanced Browser Settings
You can use these recommended values or tweak them as per your system, preference, and
browsing habits.
network.dns.disableIPv6 [Boolean]: Disable IPv6 if your ISP doesn’t support it (most don’t).
network.prefetch-next [Boolean]: This specifies whether Firefox pre-fetches web pages (and
associated cookies) even before you visit them. It is most frequently used to pre-load the
first result of a Google search. If you want to improve security and don’t want Firefox to load
pages you never actually visit, change this to False. See the FAQ for more information.