Crazy Like a Firefox
So my Firefox was crazy slow/lagged/bogged down. If I opened a new tab, Firefox would freeze for a second then the cursor would be in the address bar for me to type. Even then, when I typed it would freeze for a couple more seconds and then show what I typed all at once. Also, scrolling up and down web pages was very choppy and hard to control. It would again freeze on me and the next thing I know I’m father down or up from where I wanted to be on the page. Sound like something you have witnessed before? At first you may just think you’re computer is slow or becoming slower. I know I have no virus’. My computer ain’t slow. It had to be Firefox. So I searched.
Here’s the fix.
1) Clear cache. Exit Firefox.
2) Go to your [url=http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox]profile folder[/url]
3) Delete all sessionstore.js files and duplicate cookies.
4) Restart Firefox
But wait there’s more, and now with mo faster instructions!
These will make the browser use your network connection more efficiently or, depending on your perspective, more aggressively, which should visibly speed up rendering pages in the browser. It’s only best to use the next set of directions if you have a broadband connection (cable, dsl, fios, etc.).
1) Open Firefox (if you haven’t already)
2) Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:
network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
3) Alter the entries as follows:
Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true” (simply double click the entry)
Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true” (simply double click the entry)
Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.
Now right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.
4) Close Firefox
5) Re-open and test for speed
All of this solved my Firefox woes, and now for the low, low price of free, all your dreams of a browsing quickly on the Interwebbing Mega Parkway can come true.
Also in “about:config”…
layout.spellcheckDefault = 2 turns on Firefox 2’s spell-checking in input fields as well as textareas.
Set your browser.cache.memory.capacity to a value that fits your total RAM. For RAM sizes between 512BM and 1GB, start with 15000. For RAM sizes between 128MB and 512M, try 5000.