Tips to Make Firefox Run Faster
Mozilla's Firefox Web browser is the second-most popular browser after Microsoft's Internet Explorer. If you frequently use Firefox -- and especially if you multitask -- you may find yourself frustrated if it runs slowly. Firefox may be slow to load or occasionally lag even if you have closed background programs and do not open many concurrent tabs. However, there are several ways that you can make Firefox run faster.
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Upgrade
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Mozilla periodically releases updates to its Web browser. Downloading these updates not only provides fixes to bugs and known security issues, but also improves the performance of the program. According to the company, changes to Firefox's programming structure and the way that Firefox handles Javascript have resulted in faster page loads, smoother scrolling up and down, and faster-running Web applications.
Personal Data
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The more personal data you have, the more time Firefox requires upon loading. In addition to this, your bookmarks menu or address bar may lag, and it can take additional time to open the bookmarks/history list in a side pane. Periodically clean out your bookmarks -- and delete broken bookmarks -- to make Firefox run faster. In addition, consider exporting some bookmarks to an HTML, or Web page, file that you can load to access the specific links that you want to save but only use infrequently.
The "Tools" menu allows you to clear your browsing and download history -- if these lists become so large that they cause Firefox to slow.
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Extensions
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Another way to improve Firefox's performance speed is to reduce extensions by disabling any extensions that you are not currently using from the "Tools" menu. This same screen also allows you to completely uninstall extensions that you no longer use or that are not compatible with your version of Firefox. Firefox periodically checks for updates to your plugins, which you should download to ensure that your extensions are compatible. If you are experiencing lag or crashing that may be plugin related, disable all plugins and enable them, one by one, to locate the specific plugin that is causing issues.
Modifications
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There are several extensions, tweaks and hacks that you can install or add to Firefox to improve performance. For example, you can customize settings by typing "about:config" into the address bar to bring up the configurations page. Here, you can reduce the width of Firefox's tabs to minimize the amount of scrolling you have to do, as scrolling can slow your browser. FasterFox is a third-party add-on that primarily tweaks network settings so that your browser loads websites faster. Also consider Firefox Preloader, a standalone application that preloads some elements of Firefox to reduce boot time.
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References
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