Author Topic: Make Firefox 3 load faster (Read 59043 times)

dantheman · « **on:** February 02, 2009, 12:56 PM »

Most of the tweaks i saw in this vid didn't do much for me.
But a little further into the clip, there were a few i had never seen and so i decide to give them a shot. Working on XP Home SP2, this has made a notable difference for me.

Link to video.

Be advised that you may want to lower your speaker volume...

f0dder · « **Reply #1 on:** February 02, 2009, 02:17 PM »

Why oh why make a video of something like that, instead of a blog entry?

* f0dder sighs.

EDIT: wouldn't follow that guide... blindly enabling HTTP pipelining for proxies without knowing if it's supported is bad, and disabling IPv6 DNS seems misguided. And what's with "Expose full path to plugins", hmm? Initialpaintdelay=0 could spike up your CPU usage dramatically because a page might need a lot of re-flowing as it's loaded.

dantheman · « **Reply #2 on:** February 02, 2009, 03:52 PM »

Video clips like these could be handy for nerds like me.

With regards to CPU usage, that could be true but with the improved start up speed i noticed, i guess at this point i'm ready to take the chance. Heck, it's almost just as fast as Opera 10 alpha!

Ehtyar · « **Reply #3 on:** February 02, 2009, 04:00 PM »

IPV6 delaying DNS queries was a known bug in older versions of Firefox. AFAIK is has been fixed for some time.

IMO Mozilla needs a warning when you install addons that warn they may significantly slow Firefox. I'm SOOOO tired of people whining about Firefox being slow, only to discover they're using 50 addons.

Ehtyar,

f0dder · « **Reply #4 on:** February 02, 2009, 04:04 PM »

dantheman: wouldn't a blog entry with screenshots be just as good? In addition to being readable at your own pace, instead of a video that's either too fast or slow moving?

Besides, those tips don't speed up loading time of FireFox, but have to do with page load time (pipelining) and perceived rendering speed (initial paint delay... which doesn't make the page load/display faster at all).

urlwolf · « **Reply #5 on:** February 02, 2009, 04:04 PM »

If you are obsessed with speed you may want to try seamonkey 2 alpha. It has the JS engine of the latest FF and it's actually very stable.

f0dder · « **Reply #6 on:** February 02, 2009, 04:16 PM »

If you are obsessed with speed you may want to try seamonkey 2 alpha. It has the JS engine of the latest FF and it's actually very stable.
-urlwolf (February 02, 2009, 04:04 PM)

Can't see how that would make pages load faster nor make the browser start up faster?

(But how it helps with javascript-heavy sites - sure!)

dantheman · « **Reply #7 on:** February 02, 2009, 06:51 PM »

urlwolf,

Every time i've installed Seamonkey to give it a spin, it seems to conflict with existing Firefox installation.

- - -

f0dder,

Actually, i kind of liked the video idea.
I could pause it etc.
But i do agree with you that it's not the best method.

dantheman · « **Reply #8 on:** February 05, 2009, 12:25 PM »

@urlwolf,

Hey! Guess what?!
I decided to listend to you and just installed one of the Seamonkey Alpha's and it is just dynamite!

It picked up my Thunderbird configurations and data in a synch.
But i wonder why it picked up my IE favs instead of my Firefox ones?
People still use IE?

Seamonkey starts up like it's going to the moon and it's not even sitting on my taskbar.
The search field for the mail app is just superduper fast!

All and all, i'm really impressed since last time i tried it over a year ago.

Paul Keith · « **Reply #9 on:** February 05, 2009, 01:06 PM »

umm...I'm not a technical Firefox user who knows what these settings are specifically but...

Articles:

http://chris.pirillo...om/speed-up-firefox/

http://www.tweakguid...s.com/Firefox_1.html

http://codebetter.co...005/01/28/48720.aspx

http://www.techradar...culously-fast-468317

Add-on:

https://addons.mozil...S/firefox/addon/9148

Software:

http://lifehacker.co...th-firefox-preloader

P.S. I could never get MetaCafe videos working so I'm just guessing these are what the video is about.

NewsAndHistory · « **Reply #10 on:** February 08, 2009, 04:15 PM »

DanTheMan, thanks for your kindness & help.

dantheman · « **Reply #11 on:** February 08, 2009, 05:16 PM »

NewsAndHistory (that's an original alias!)

I am humbled!

Honestly, i'm don't feel i contribute much here and feel more like tiny player in the midst of big league players.

BTW, welcome to the forum!

Oh! Before we go off the subject, Minimize to Tray is a nice addon for Firefox and Thunderbird.

cmpm · « **Reply #12 on:** February 08, 2009, 07:32 PM »

FF3 seems fast enough as is.
Pipelining actually slowed it down. imo.
Fasterfox, or Lite or Tweak Network,
all seemed to have a slower effect on my machine.

Granted it's not a top of the line computer.
But I've found that many functions are already in FF and just hidden. Cutting down on add ons.
'Toolbar Buttons' gives these extras a quick access point to put in the toolbars.
I have 24 add ons that seem to not be bothersome.
Using 'Minimize to Tray' which is officially 'experimental', ha!
I just have to restart FF once in a while when it gets a cold and needs to blow it's nose.

Now we are at 3.0.6 and I don't think these tweaks are keeping up. I don't keep up with any nightly builds though.

dantheman · « **Reply #13 on:** February 08, 2009, 07:39 PM »

"Minimize to Tray" is probably 'experimental' because it's been adjusted to FF3 and to work with Thunderbird at same time.

A cold start on my ol' notebook doesn't take away any snot.
For some reason it always takes about a minute before i can type in any urls or do anything else with it.

And i have about 20 extensions too.

sgtevmckay · « **Reply #14 on:** February 08, 2009, 07:58 PM »

Love Firefox III.
Been using the Gecko system way back in Netscape 4.1

I utilize about 54 add-ons. Now granted this slows Programs start-up, but it is a fair trade off for the add-ons that I use.
Load time is about 73 seconds.

Now over the years I have learned that there is little you can do about load time for Firefox.
My load time is delayed by a handful of my Add-ons, but I find that if I unload my add-ons or start Firefox in safe mode, the increase in load time is nominally faster by just a few seconds, approximately 14 seconds.

The load time for Firefox is incredible compared to any version of IE, Opera, or Safari so I have no complaints.
Now depending on how much bandwidth you have for an internet connection, I can speed up your specs well beyond the current specified Firefox spec's, and do so while being stable.

But as for load time we are stuck.
Now the biggest slow down to loading Firefox, or any web application, is monitoring software (ie, anti-virus, process watchers, Threatfire, nortons IS, AVG IS, Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D so on). The more of these running the slower the load time.

You want to see the load time on your browser reduced, shut down any Anti-virus or process monitoring software.

Now as for the Minimize to tray; there is a huge trade off for this little add-on. This allows FFIII to run in the background all the time, and if you set it up to run on boot, your computer takes longer to boot. You definitely do not want FF slowing down your system or slowly consuming your resources while sitting in your tray. Trust me on this one.

Realistically: there is no instant on. Only compromises.

cmpm · « **Reply #15 on:** February 08, 2009, 08:17 PM »

I use cleanmem to keep firefox in check. While it doesn't clear the memory cache of FF, it does knock the program down to around 5000, every 30 minutes, then slowly back up to 60,000 or 80,000, but not like it was going up to 200,000. Worth it to have quick access to FF and where ever I left off.

Also there is an add on called 'cache status' but it sometimes hungup on the memory deal and locked. Plus I think it was a mem leaker like quite a few of the add ons. So I try to stay away from those.

Flash block really helps with quick page loading. Seems every one is embedding flash everywhere!

Came across this, but I don't know. I'm surfing fine now, I'd hate to screw it up.

http://www.esnips.co...ltimate-optimizer-11

Edit-further research shows no real comments of value or actual tests.
I advise against this 'ultimate optimizer'.

dantheman · « **Reply #16 on:** February 08, 2009, 08:21 PM »

Wow! That was quite the writeup Magis esse!

And so many extensions!

I'm surprised you don't have many more issues.

Anyway, i did a quick search and someone in another forum pointed out that the History being kept is set at 90 days!

Yup. So i changed it to 7, cleared history cache and cookies and, although it may be too soon to tell, everything seems to be pretty well in ship shape now.

BTW, "MinimizetoTray" isn't to be confused with "Firefox Preloader" (which has been upgraded since 2005). The latter would preload/boot with the OS, not "MtT"

@cmpm, ya, i kind of had that intuition.

f0dder · « **Reply #17 on:** February 09, 2009, 07:51 AM »

Firefox page loading (and rendering) is plenty fast - when people say "load faster" I immediately think of loading the application which could be a lot faster. I really hope the dev team will focus on that issue soon. Preloading and minimize-to-tray are just symptomatic fixes, and minize-to-tray seems like a bad idea to me (while a very large amount of memory leaks have been fixed in FF3, it still has a few here and there).

Pipelining actually slowed it down. imo.
-cmpm (February 08, 2009, 07:32 PM)

Sounds weird - works wonders here. But for the few servers that use broken HTTP daemons that bork on pipelining, you could face slowdowns or even pages that refuse to load. But while you might not see speedups (especially on slower connections) pipelining shouldn't cause slowdown.

The load time for Firefox is incredible compared to any version of IE, Opera, or Safari so I have no complaints.
-sgtevmckay (February 08, 2009, 07:58 PM)

Yeah, incredibly slow

- IE6 loadtime is hard to beat. And please no "IE is part of the OS" argument, it's bullocks (besides, hot-cache loads of FF are still slower than cold-cache loads of IE6).

I use cleanmem to keep firefox in check.
-cmpm (February 08, 2009, 08:17 PM)

Is that one of those snake-oil "memory optimizers"? Those applications are pretty counter-productive. First, they cause flushing to the pagefile (disk write == super slow), followed by a re-read from the pagefile when the app needs the data again (disk read == slow). Second, windows will do this "trim working set" as needed, and start with the least used applications. Third, it doesn't really fix the memory leaks.

cmpm · « **Reply #18 on:** February 09, 2009, 09:15 AM »

Works for me fodder. It doesn't 0 out everything.
No change in the page file when CleanMem is run.
I've checked it by running it manually.

If you have a way to fix the mem leaks, lets hear it please.
I just avoid the worst add ons, that leak mem,
and that's about all I know to do.

I took out Fasterfox and Tweak Network and it seems to improve speed and stability.

cmpm · « **Reply #19 on:** February 09, 2009, 09:27 AM »

from

http://www.pcwintech.com/node/145

So now lets start with how Cleanmem works. Cleanmem is very small as it doesn't need to do much. First off Cleanmem doesn't clean the memory from the processes itself! It asks Windows to do that. When the program starts up it grabs a list of running processes. It then grabs the ID of each process and calls the Windows API EmptyWorkingSet for each processes, Cleanmem of course checks the ignore list and skips those processes. Then Windows cleans the process, and once all the processes have been cleaned Cleanmem closes itself.

Well that's the part that seems to freak some people out, if the memory is being cleaned then the process itself will suffer! the memory will be pushed to the hard drive! the world will end! And guess what they are wrong. So let me explain why. The API call only removes memory no longer being used by the process. It doesn't touch memory in use

f0dder · « **Reply #20 on:** February 09, 2009, 10:39 AM »

Fixing memory leaks: hunt down bugs in source code and recompile. No way around it.

As far CleanMem, at least it doesn't use the L-A-M-E old method of grabbing a truckload of memory - good. But it's still utterly useless, since Windows automatically does this trimming when needed. And while it's not guaranteed to flush things to the paging file, it can do that. Besides, even when not flushing dirty pages, clean pages (code from .exe/.dll files) will have to be re-read from disk if the application needs it. Since CleanMem runs through all processes (except blacklisted ones), it doesn't do the Least-[/b]Recently-Used which Windows itself does.

Stop obsessing over how much "free memory" windows task manager says you have, as this is a pretty useless figure.

cmpm · « **Reply #21 on:** February 09, 2009, 10:49 AM »

and what has you thinkin i'm using task manager?

Fixing memory leaks: hunt down bugs in source code and recompile. No way around it.

i'd be glad to do this if i knew what i was doing

cmpm · « **Reply #22 on:** February 09, 2009, 10:54 AM »

i'm not obsessing over anything, the main reason for me to use cleanmem is because i use minimize to tray and don't want to restart ff when mem gets crazy

and YES ff pops up right away out of the tray
like it's supposed to, like i want it to

sheesh...

dantheman · « **Reply #23 on:** February 12, 2009, 07:43 AM »

Hi,

The main reason i was looking to make Firefox load faster was because of a theme (Silvermel) that stalling my browser (could type in url box, click links in toolbar etc for about 2 minuntes after start up, sometimes browser would simply go into limbo). The reason why i am absolutely certain now is because of the latest update that rendered my search engine box inoperative. It's not easy when you have about 20 extensions and half a dozen themes.

Thanks Mozilla team for this excellent browser!

Just wish any extension/theme would cease to come into conflict with similar or with browser.
Opera doesn't have this issue with widgets (but they have other issues of course).

Don't need minimize to tray anymore!

mitzevo · « **Reply #24 on:** February 12, 2009, 07:48 AM »

Run Firefox with no more than 3 extensions/addons and your ok!