There are a few things that Firefox users can to do make Firefox start faster. There is the Firefox preloader application that loads on system start, the Firefox extension Bar Tab which loads tabs on demand and not all together on startup, cleaning the Firefox preferences file, the SpeedyFox software for Windows, or Vacuum Places add-on to optimize the SQLite databases used by the browser.

Long time Ghacks reader OAlexander just emailed me another tip to make Firefox start faster that I have not heard about before. He mentioned that he removed excess locales from his installed extensions and noticed that Firefox would start up noticeable faster.

Firefox extensions often come with multiple locales to provide users from all over the world with information in their own language. Most users usually only need one or maybe two of the locales. It appears however that all locales are loaded on startup when the extension is loaded (Can anyone confirm this?)

So, to make Firefox start up faster users would have to delete excess locales from the Firefox extensions. An unzip software like 7-Zip is required for that operation. I explain how it is done with 7-Zip.

Make Firefox Start Faster

The first task is to locate the Firefox profile directory, which is the directory where the extensions are stored in. Firefox 3.6 and up users can click on Help > Troubleshoot Information to launch the file browser of the system with the profile folder as the selected folder.

Before we start modifying anything we need to backup the extensions folder. This is just a precaution, but it is always better to have an option to restore a previous state.

Open the extensions folder and take a look around. Some extensions are stored in folders, while others are stored in .xpi files. The folders are basically unzipped xpi files, so no need to worry about the differences.

What you need to do now is to fire up your unzip software and navigate to the Firefox profile folder. 7-Zip users can copy the file path from the system file browser and paste it into the path field in 7-zip. Make sure you close Firefox at this point, otherwise you will not be able to remove content from the extensions since they are in use when Firefox is open.

I suggest to work your way from top to bottom, starting with the xpi files and not the folders. Simple double-click on an xpi file to open its contents in 7-Zip. You will notice that they have a similar structure as those folders in the extensions root folder.

The path to the locales is always the same: Extension root folder > chrome > locale > filename.jar

Follow the path. Once the local folder is the root folder you may notice that multiple locales are provided by the Firefox add-on. You may now select all but the locales that you want to use. Press delete afterwards to delete them from the extension. Confirm that you want to delete the folders and files.

Now switch back to the extensions directory and repeat the process for all installed extensions. The folders are handled the same way.

Once all locale folders that are not needed have been removed it is time to start Firefox to see if the modification has made a difference. The effect depends largely on the installed extensions. Users with dozens of extensions may see a big decrease in startup time.

There is one problem though that needs to be mentioned. It is likely that extension updates will add the locale folders again to the extension. Which means that Firefox users need to delete the locale folders again whenever an extension gets updated.

Did you try this tip? What was the result on your system? Have another tip to speed up Firefox? Let everyone know in the comments.

QuickDrag, as the name implies, adds drag and drop to the browser to speed some of the actions. To be precise, it can speed up saving images on a page, loading urls and performing searches.

To save an image, the user would simply drag it a bit around, and the same operation is used to perform a search for highlighted text that gets dragged and website links.

Those three drag and drop operations are the standard features offered by the Firefox add-on. These are refined with hotkeys that need to be activated during the drag and drop process.

To open an image in a new tab, instead of saving it, a user would hold down the CTRL key while dragging and dropping the image. Urls, that are usually opened in a new tab when dragged can also be saved to the local computer by holding down ALT while dragging them on the page.

quickdrag

The settings of the add-on contain additional options. Here it is possible to select if tabs for web addresses and text searches should be opened in the foreground as opposed to being opened in the background which is the default setting. It is furthermore possible to make clickable links open in new tabs as well instead of providing search and save functionality. Clickable links by default can be opened in new tabs by middle-clicking. That’s why the program offers to search or save them only by default.

Finally, there is an option to disable the downloading of images when they are dragged. This in turn will open them in a new tab instead.

QuickDrag can speed up some actions in the Firefox web browser. It is best suited for Firefox users who often perform those while working in the browser.

The reason for the performance drop is simple. Web browsers like Firefox try to load all tabs at once, which increases the resource usage temporarily.

BarTab is a Firefox add-on that tries to resolve those issues by changing the default website loading behavior to on demand loading.

This basically means that tabs are only loaded when they become active for the first time. Only one tab is for instance loaded during system startup, all others remain inactive in the tab bar. This inactivity is indicated with transparency.

The same process applies if multiple websites are selected by the user to be loaded at once.

The browser extension can also unload tabs, to free up memory in the browser. A right-click on a tab displays two new context menu entries, to unload the selected tab or to unload all but the selected tab.

speed up firefox

The options contain several settings to change the default behavior. It is for instance possible to add sites to a whitelist so that they are always loaded when opened.

It is furthermore possible to unload tabs automatically after inactivity, to reduce the memory usage of the browser.

BarTab can speed up Firefox by loading tabs on demand, and the option to automatically unload loaded tabs keeps the overall system resource usage on a lower level.

The add-on is directly available from the Mozilla Add-on repository over at Mozilla.com.

Some users, especially those with the Google Toolbar installed, experienced a huge history database that had a size of several hundreds Megabytes. A good way of speeding up the Firefox web browser is to limit the history that it records.

Most users know that it is possible to change the minimum days the history is stored in the Firefox options. What only a few know is that there are additional settings in the about:config dialog that make it possible to change the hard limit and the maximum days a website is kept in the history.

To speed up Firefox by limiting the history do the following: Open a new web browser tab and load the page [about:config]. Now filter for the term [browser.history] and locate the following three parameters:

• browser.history_expire_days: The maximum days that Firefox stores websites in the history database. (default 180)
• browser.history_expire_days_min: The minimum days that Firefox stores websites in the history database (default 90)
• browser.history_expire_sites: Defines the hard limit (that is the maximum) of websites that are stored in the Firefox history. Reducing the amount from 40000 to a lower value can help a lot.

Reducing both the minimum and maximum values to a lower number can improve the performance of the web browser especially during startup. There are no perfect values which means that the user has to experiment a bit to find the values best suited for the browsing situation. Suggested values are 7,14,28 or 56 days for both settings. Users who want to get rid of the history completely need to use 0 as the value in both parameters.

Restarting the web browser after changing the parameters should get rid of the websites that exceed the maximum that has been set by the user. It might be needed to optimize the SQLite database after the procedure to ensure that the database is not fragmented because of this change.