The Ultimate Guide To Speeding Up Firefox on Netbooks

When it comes to speed, Firefox has traditionally been behind rival browsers like Chrome, Opera, and Safari. No, I’m not talking about ‘webpage rendering’ speed – that’s what causes all of today’s heated browser wars (and in which Firefox also loses spectacularly). What I’m talking about is speed of the browser – responsiveness and the ability to handle browsing tasks smoothly.

Firefox is slow. But even that is an understatement to how bad it runs on a netbook (I recently played with a netbook). One of the netbook’s primary uses is web browsing, one of the few things that inefficient netbook processors can do without a hitch.

But not with Firefox. As usual, it takes an incredible amount of time to boot. It works fine as long as you have five or less tabs open, but add a few more and it starts to choke. Install some add-ons and you’ll in fact have the Firefox browser equivalent to the death of the iPhone.

While it’s impossible to wave a magic wand and make Firefox run smoothly and quickly on netbooks, you can make a few tweaks to make it more responsive and usable on your small computers (and maybe even mainframes!).

We’ll discuss those tweaks in detail below, but before that, let me understand one thing:

Why not use Chrome instead?

Okay, Chrome is an incredibly good browser. It’s pretty fast at rendering web pages, but where it really shines is

own speed

. Chrome starts up as fast as Notepad and is smooth at tasks like switching between dozens of tabs, or scrolling smoothly through “heavy” web pages (reading Gmail) or simply getting out of your way while you’re browsing.

Chrome is a great application to use on netbooks, but it has its own problems. Its sandboxing and single-tab processing features mean it consumes more memory than Firefox. With most netbooks only having a small 1 GB of RAM (where Windows 7 Starter consumes about 600 MB when idle), Chrome can easily eat up your memory and make your poor netbook gasp.

If your netbook has 2 GB of RAM, Chrome will easily become your primary browser. If not, Firefox might be your only option.

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Now that all Chrome confusion is cleared up, let’s see how we can develop Firefox bit by bit on netbook.

1. Always use the latest version of Firefox

Every new update to Firefox brings small performance improvements, all of which together can go a long way in making the browser perform much better. So don’t skip the updates. By default, Firefox will automatically download and install the minor point updates for you, while you have to perform the major point updates yourself. Continue to check Firefox’s available updater to check for new updates from time to time.

By the way, if you don’t mind a few bugs here and there, I suggest you go and download the latest beta of Firefox 4 from here. It’s still not as fast as Chrome or Opera, but it runs significantly better than Firefox 3.6(.8) on my netbook. The obvious trade-offs include occasional bugs and incompatibility with most add-ons (both of which will be fixed as the version approaches the final release).

2. Reset your profile or start over

Have you ever noticed that Firefox is pretty snappy at first and starts to slow down over time? This is not like what happens with Windows and is due to information constantly piling up in your computer. Firefox Profile.

If your Firefox has become too slow to manage, you should start over by resetting your current profile or creating a new one.

Resetting your existing configuration is easy – start Firefox in safe mode (enter “safe mode” on the Start menu and the required shortcut will appear), select the settings you want to reset, and finally click “Make changes and restart”.

If you want to bring Firefox back to zero, it’s a good idea to create a new profile and switch to that profile. To open the Firefox profile manager, type firefox.exe –ProfileManager in the Start menu and click the required shortcut. The profile manager window itself is pretty straightforward, where you can create a new profile and switch to it permanently, delete your current profile, etc. (You need to close the Firefox window to see the profile manager)

Note: Windows XP users do not have access to the search feature as you type in their Start menu, so they must activate the Run dialog (Win key + R) and type firefox.exe –ProfileManager to access the profile manager. To launch Firefox in safe mode, find the Mozilla Firefox folder in the All Programs menu and you will find the required shortcut in it.

3. Disable Personas or Themes You’re Using

As of 3.6, Firefox supports two types of ‘skins’ – comprehensive native themes and lightweight Personas. If you’re using either, it’s better to disable them and use the built-in theme instead. You can easily switch to the default “Strata” theme from the “Themes” tab in Tools -> Add-ons. The transition will happen instantly if you’re using Persona and will require a restart if you’re using a full theme.

The interface is a bit different on Firefox 4 beta, as the Add-ons section has been moved to a tab. As above, go to Tools -> Add-ons, switch the horizontal “Themes” tab and enable the default theme.

4. Set higher priority for Firefox.exe

This is a killer, and inconvenient at the same time. Recently, Firefox has been one of the most memory efficient browsers out there, but on netbooks, it seems to be almost performance sacrifice to control memory.

Of course, you can make your way with Windows Task Manager. Make sure that Firefox is running, then right-click on the taskbar and select “Start Task Manager”. Switch to the “Processes” tab and search for the firefox.exe process. Right click on it and select the “Set Priority” option to “Above Normal”. Don’t choose “High” or “Real-Time” as it can heavily tax your system and cripple the performance of other running programs.

Ignore the warning to seal your preferences:

This will ensure that Firefox gets a higher priority in CPU cycles than other non-Windows services (usually set to Normal priority), and thus keeps the browser running significantly smoother. The interesting thing is that you have to repeat this process every times you open Firefox, but there’s a not-so-bad way to get around it:

• Learn not to close Firefox. When your browsing is over, minimize Firefox instead of closing it. The memory leak that plagued Firefox in the past days has mostly been fixed, so don’t worry.
• Instead of shutting down your system, put it into hibernation. Hibernation saves all your settings and windows before powering down the system and restores them as-is after you turn on the netbook. This ensures that Firefox will always float in your computer’s memory (since you don’t close it) with an “above normal” priority.

This is obviously not an effective method, as Firefox needs to close and restart more often than other browsers.

Also, as you might have guessed, the performance of other concurrently running applications may suffer a bit as Firefox gets more affection from your processor.

5. Enable Hardware Acceleration (Firefox 4 beta only)

Firefox 4 is set to support Direct2D hardware acceleration on Windows Vista/7. This will allow Firefox to use your graphics unit (GPU) instead of the CPU for intensive browsing tasks, thus keeping the following browser free of bottlenecks and satisfied.

The Intel GPU level on most netbooks is terrible, but it’s still powerful enough to handle web browsing. This feature is disabled by default in the latest beta version of Firefox 4, but you can enable it with a few simple steps,

• In a new tab, enter about:config. Click “I will be careful; I promise” will overcome the warning.
• In the ‘filter’ box (just below the tabs), type “render” to show only those values ​​with that word.
• For 7 or more entries, find gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled and double-click it to change the value to true (false by default).
• Next, find mozilla.widget.render-mode, double-click it and change the value from -1 to 6 in the box that appears. Click OK.
• That’s it! Close the tab, restart Firefox and continue your work.

Be aware that there’s a reason hardware acceleration is disabled by default right now – it’s obviously not polished enough and you might run into a few other issues here and there. But if you ask me, a slightly unstable usable browser is much better than a completely unusable browser. Again, this feature may be enabled by default in the final version of FF 4.

6. Block unwanted Flash and Scripts

This point conflicts directly with the latter, but for a valid reason. Some sites have a lot of Flash and junk javascript content, all of them will completely

destroy the cowardly Atom processor

. So you should absolutely go install

NoScript Add-ons

for Firefox, blocks Flash scripts and content on all websites by default.

Of course, you can choose to selectively whitelist sites that can’t function without these elements (like YouTube or MiniClip), and it can be difficult to keep whitelisting new sites as you keep visiting them, but the ultimate reward is – a responsive Firefox and a snappy processor.

7. Use as few add-ons as possible

NoScript helps prevent Firefox from removing your processor. However, the majority of add-ons will actually help it do so. Unless you really need any add-on, don’t install it on Firefox for your netbook. Firefox Sync is my only desperately needed add-on; for you it could be something else. In any case, try to keep the number of add-ons below 3.

8. Say NO to HD Video Streaming

Netbooks, with their Atom processors and lousy Intel graphics, were never designed to consume HD media. Keep this in mind when you stream any video (from YouTube or other sites). Always use the lowest quality available – and forget anything above 360p. Obviously it’s not Firefox’s fault – it’s just that the netbook can’t handle HD streaming.

9. Read the Tech Guide????

Serious! The entire team at Guiding Tech loves Firefox for all its openness and extensibility (make no mistake, we also love Chrome). We’ve covered many posts about Firefox in the past, including using Firefox Preloader to make Firefox boot faster. And you can always expect us to cover more Firefox acceleration articles in the future.

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Conclusion

Firefox is a pretty good browser. However, the way it has fallen behind the curve over the past year or two has annoyed many of its loyal users. Mozilla needs to take this as a challenge and make the browser the nimble little fox it once was. Right now, they seem to care more about the candy tabs and wallpaper look and feel for reasons I can’t fathom.

Personas and the new tab switcher won’t win over more Firefox users; allowing people to truly browse the web in peace. Until that happens, we can all do with these small performance-improving tweaks and keep the beast performing.

Do you have your own Firefox speed tips? Do share with us in the comments!

Image credits – exhibition room, Thales Barreto

Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/