10 ultimate ways to make Firefox perform blazing fast

From my blog statistics, i know that most of my blog readers use Firefox to access my blog. Firefox is improving day by day and people all around the web are switching to it leaving IE and Microsoft.

With some great features in its fold, Firefox rules. Still there’s lot to be done. Today we will talk about how to make Firefox blazing fast with some tips and tricks.

1.Increase Snapshot frequency of your browsing session

Starting with Firefox 3, snapshots of the browser session are taken every 10 second by Firefox so that the session can be restored back in case of some crash of the browser. You can increase this snapshot frequency to a much larger value to make your Firefox run a bit fast.

Here’s how you can do this.

• Type ‘about:config’ in to the address bar and hit “Enter” to access Firefox’s advanced  browser settings.
• Click the warning button to accept it. After this,using filter box find  “browser.sessionstore.interval” without quotes.
• Change the value of 10000 (10 seconds in milliseconds) to larger value such as 240000, which is 4 minutes depending on how much you are comfortable with the restore sessions option.

2. Remove annoying (at least to me) Add-on Installation Delay

Whenever you try to install any add on, you will be presented with a delaying screen of few seconds. If you are sure about your installations of Add ons, you can remove this small annoyance by changing t:he following

• Type “about:config” in to the address bar and hit “Enter” to access Firefox’s advanced  browser settings.
• Click the warning button to accept it. After this,using filter box find the following entry “security.dialog_enable_delay – and edit the value to “0″ to start the installation of Add-on’s  immediately.

3. Remove delay of Download manager Dialog box

Remove the download manager box opening delay whenever something gets downloaded. Change the following settings to bypass opening of download manager box.

• browser.download.manager.openDelay – Find and edit this value to 3000 (3 seconds) so that the downloads window does not open for those super small downloads.

4. Open Search results in New Tab

When you use the inbuilt browser search function, the results open in same tab. Change the value below to open it in new tab.

• browser.search.openintab – By default, this value is set to False. Change this value True so that when you use the built in browser search, the results will open in a new tab instead of same tab.

5. Lower The Physical Memory Used When Firefox is Minimized

Creating a setting in the advance configuration, The memory used at the instant Firefox is minimized can be reduced by freeing up the physical memory and using the virtual memory letting other programs to use  the memory freed.The memory used will be back to normal when you maximise it.

You need to create this setting.Right click on the background and select New->Boolean.

Enter the name when prompted: config.trim_on_minimize

Enter the values: True

6. Limiting The History

By default, Firefox stores history for full 90 days. Over the time as the file size and database of history grows, the performance of Firefox gets hit. We need to limit this history to make firefox faster.

In “about:config” settings, filter for the term “browser.history” and locate the following three values:

• 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.

Change both the minimum and maximum values to a lower value to improve the performance specially during startup. Choose these values depending on your need. Smaller these values are, faster will be your browser.

7. Optimize SQLite Databases In Firefox

With firefox 3, SQLIte Databases are used within firefox to manage different entries. The database keeps on growing as the day passes by. The databse associated with your browsing profile gets fragmented resulting in poor browsing experience.

You need to de-fragment the databases to make firefox perform better. There are manual ways to do it, But you can use Speedyfox to achieve the same in just a single click making your browser run fast again.

Some Other Tweaks to make Firefox Faster

8. Network Pipelining

Config name: network.http.pipelining
Default: False
Modified value: True

9. Network Proxy pipelining setting

Config name: network.http.proxy.pipelining
Default: False
Modified value: True

10. Max. Requests and connections settings

Config name: network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Default: 4
Modified value: any value higher than 4, but not more than 8

Config name: network.http.max-connections
Default: 30
Modified value: more than 90

Config name: network.http.max-connections-per-server
Default: 15
Modified value: more than 30

These settings are collected over time by me and i thought of compiling them here. Some of the settings may not work as good as required in latest version of firefox. Anyway, i would love to hear comments from you guys about whatever is written above about making Firefox faster.