Optimizing Your Firefox Installation with SpeedyFox

[Rob Williams]

In the software world, the word "Boost" is synonymous with the exclamation, "BS!", as nearly every kind of third-party software speed boost turns out to have the unwritten small print of "under certain conditions"... roughly translated as "this is useless". People often try to speed up their Internet connection with MTU adjustments, page pool expansions and all kinds of magical software and registry 'hacks' that do nothing but confuse, irritate and often break computers. So imagine my surprise when I came across a simple little application that "boosts" Firefox - in a real and tangible way.

Read the rest of our TG Tip here and discuss it here!

 

[Optix]

Thanks Rob *AHEM* Thanks Jamie. I'll check this out tonight but you're right; Mozilla should be checking into why the slow down is happening in the first place but at the least integrate this little app into the browser.

 

[Rob Williams]

This is Jamie's doing, not mine!

I agree though, Mozilla SHOULD consider adding a feature like this to the browser, but I guess given the relatively small gain, the developers don't feel adding what could be 100KB to the end install would be worth it.

 

[Tharic-Nar]

They should integrate it into the 'housekeeping' part of any patches/updates they make. So when they release an update, it optimizes the database as well, I'm sure they could build a script into the installer to handle it. Building it into the app itself may be a little more tricky, but it could be done on a per week basis or per launch basis (ever 20 sessions or so). I did notice that each session became slower and slower, so if you open and close FF more often, then you'll need to run the optimizer more frequently.

 

[Optix]

So I just ran the application for the first time and the difference was immediately noticeable in everything from opening Firefox with saved tabs to pulling up websites. Very nice.