Firefox Tweaks, Extensions and Optimizations
04.10.06 - 09:44pm
There has been a lot of news flying around and I have simply not had the time to write about it, the last couple of days have been very busy, expect a flurry of articles in the coming days. Now lets explore the wonder that is known as Firefox.
Over the last few months I have noticed people complaining about Firefox and the memory ‘leaks’ and how much memory Firefox hordes for itself. I guess for some people the 40-60Mb of ram that Firefox is sitting on is expensive, but for me, Firefox doesn’t get close to touching my gig of ram, but for those performance nuts that like to do SuperPI runs while browsing the internet, this guide is for you. I have spent days and days (edit: hours) scouring the internet for all the tweaks, hacks, hax, plug-ins, extensions, and tricks that let you eke out every bit of performance and efficiency from Firefox. First off, the hacks.
Minimize Hack
The first hack that I have here is the popular Firefox Minimize Hack that has recently flashed through the internet. The purpose of this hack tries to keep Firefox from eating up your physical RAM and instead puts the burden on your hard drive, or at least that is the general reason behind it. To implement this hack, perform the following steps.
1. With Firefox up and running, type about:config and hit enter.
2. Right click on the new page and select New -> Boolean.
3. In the pop-up window, type in “config.trim_on_minimize” without quotes and hit enter.
4. In the next pop-up window, select True and hit enter.
5. Restart your browser
With that done, open up a bunch of tabs and monitor the memory usage. In my first run without this hack, Firefox was using 137.8 Mb of Ram. With all 30 tabs open again, Firefox was using 118.4 Mb, but when minimized this dropped to an astounding 4 Mb. However, this was too good to be true, I left Firefox minimized and came back 12 minutes later and the memory use had slowly creeped up to 42.4 Mb. While this was 10 times larger than the initial 4.2 Mb, I was still saving about 75 Mb. One note about this, the memory was still very slowly creeping up by about 1 Mb per minute, maybe more or less per minute, but either way it was still creeping. I would have liked to test to see if it would creep up to the original 118.4 Mb but that would have required more than an hour and I am impatient. Another note, when I had Firefox maximized it was using 66 Mb with Flickr.com as the main tab, but 119 Mb when I quickly browsed through all my tabs and then quickly retreated back down to 66 Mb. I don’t know what causes this, but either way, for the most time it was using 66 Mb. The verdict: useful and free with no downloads.
Back Button Hack
The next hack deals with Firefox’s Cache. Whenever you jump around the Internet, Firefox caches your previous pages to make your internet browsing blazing fast. However this causes Firefox to consume memory that you may not ever need to use. To implement this hack, perform the following the following steps.
1. With Firefox up and running, type about:config and hit enter.
2. Find “browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers” and instead of the -1 setting, change it to 0 and hit Enter.
3. Restart your browser.
Before using this hack I went to Cnn.com and entered 10 different articles but never touched the back button, just using links. Upon the 10th article, Firefox was using 41Mb. I performed the hack and performed the same step by visiting the same sites with a cleared Cache, and memory usage was down to 33.7 Mb. This value never changed even after a few minutes left idle on the final page. Verdict: not a large saving with a slight decrease in browser rendering speed, worth it if you are ram limited.
Network Hack
This next group of hacks all relate to the network.http group in about:config. Basically these various options open up your network connection to Firefox, permitting it to access information online as quickly as your connection will permit you. Since the majority of my readers utilize broadband connections, this will benefit you, 56k you are tough out of luck, sorry. To implement these hacks, perform the following steps.
1. With Firefox up and running, type about:config and hit enter.
2a. Find the entry called “network.http.pipelining” and set it to “true”.
2b. Find the entry called “network.http.proxy.pipelining” and set it to “true”.
2c. Find the entry called “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” and set it to 16-32, but beware, if set too high you may risk banning yourself from various servers by being mistaken for a DoS attack.
3. Restart your browser.
Even though I am sitting on Georgia Tech’s campus with a blazing fast 100Mbit connection, it seems like with these options enabled, webpages load faster, pictures in particular. When I went to Flickr.com and started clicking around, all the pictures loaded at one time unlike how it used to load a picture at a time. Either Flickr enabled a quick optimization between me closing and opening Firefox, or this trick works. Either way, it hasn’t hurt my connection at all. Verdict: Causes pictures to load very fast, but I do see an increase in network activity, more spikes than constant travel with each pageload.
Cache Hack
This next hack deals with the memory Firefox uses as cache. In the default setting, Firefox will adjust the cache size to fit however many pages you have open. While this is useful, if you tend to only have a few pages open at a time, you can manually reduce the setting to a specified amount at the cost of reducing performance when Firefox runs out of cache. To implement this hack, follow these steps.
1. With Firefox up and running, type about:config and hit enter.
2. Right click on the new page and select New -> Integer.
3. In the pop-up window, type in “browser.cache.memory.capacity”. In the following pop-up window, specify how many Kb of ram you want to dedicate to the cache, I selected 32768(32Mb). I suggest a number between 16Mb and 64Mb, anything lower and performance will suffer, anything higher is excessive. Here you should experiment, or don’t bother if it worries you.
4. Restart your browser
I don’t know how much this helps or hurts performance, so far with 32Mb enabled I have yet to see a major difference, memory use dropped from 42Mb to 39Mb with the same pages open, but I don’t think this hack is what did that. Verdict: not sure if it is useful at all.
Download Manager Hacks
This next group of hacks deal with the download manager in Firefox. For those of you that don’t use the Firefox download manager, skip this section. I don’t know about you, but I personally hate the download manager, it is annoying and generally a distraction when it pops up with its messages and warning, so, let�s do away with it. Follow these steps to tweak/destroy your manager.
1. With Firefox up and running, type about:config and hit enter.
2. Take your pick of the following attributes to modify.
3a. browser.download.manager.showAlertInterval at default shows the alert message for 2000 milliseconds or 2 seconds. I personally set it to 500 milliseconds; all I need is a quick blurb telling me my download is done.
3b. browser.download.manager.openDelay at default opens up the download manager immediately, which can be a big pain if you are downloading 10Kb files to your desktop, you don’t need that annoying manager to pop up. I have this guy set on 30,000 milliseconds or 30 seconds. If a file is larger than 30 seconds of download time, I might want to watch its progress.
3c. browser.download.manager.closeWhenDone at default is set to false so that your manager doesn’t close itself. I set it to true just to get this thing out of the way the moment it is done, I like to watch progress, but I don’t need to waste space or the time to close it.
3d. browser.download.manager.flashCount at default flashes the download manager icon in your taskbar for 2 seconds, I prefer zero seconds to reduce annoyance, adjust to your preference.
4. Restart your browser.
These hacks are just my personal preference, you may like it just the way it is, or you may want to do more. Browse through the about:config and you’ll find tons of stuff to tweak. Verdict: personal preference, doesn’t increase performance, maybe productivity.
This last hack is less of a hack and more of a good habit you should pick up. I tend to clear my cache and download list at least once a week, sometimes more often. This will usually increase performance and it will also update all content, but on a slow connection this could hurt your performance, especially if you have pictures loaded in your cache that don’t change. Do this at your own digression.
Extensions
Extensions are what make Firefox great, you can customize to your hearts content by adding extensions. The following list are the extensions that I use.
This extension places a page status bar over the address bar which creates a cool effect and also lets you know how much of the page is left to download. Useful for slower connections and just plain cool.
This is definitely the coolest extension I have seen. You know that cool thing that OSX does that lets you view all your currently open programs in little thumbnails? Well this does the same thing, but for your tabs! When I am writing an article, coding CS, or doing something else that requires lots of back and forth movement, this saves me a lot of time from having to ctrl-tab or click on tabs. To get to know reveal, take the quick 30 second tutorial that prompts you upon restart. I highly recommend this extension.
TabX is another great productivity increaser. I know whenever I have more than 2 tabs open and I am trying to select the last guy or close a tab, I mistakenly close the tab instead of click on the correct tab, causing me to close an incorrect tab. With TabX each tab gets an individual X which works when you have fewer than 10 or so tabs. Once you get to about 15 tabs, the X’s take up too much space, so use this at your own digression, I find it useful.
Who likes free online storage? I do and I’m sure you do too. This extension turns those 2+GB that Google has given to each of their users into 2GB of online storage. I find this as a great way to transfer files between computers with no need for a jump drives. While I don’t know how secure this extension is, I find it nice when I don’t want to carry a jump drive around, but nothing beats having a FTP server.
This causes Firefox to render a page with an embedded Internet Explorer within your Firefox window. I use this specific extension whenever a page renders terribly in Firefox. I wish they made an extension for Safari that would let you guys render my page in Firefox, sorry! Very useful when a page loads terribly. Be warned though, IEtab has a known memory leak but they are working on fixing it.
This extension was called in by Stu and it offers even more features than TabX and Fission. It puts “x” buttons on every tab, shows a loading status bar on each tab, lets you manipulate you add various properties to your tags, and the title goes red if the page has loaded and you haven’t checked up on it since it loaded. There are a bunch of featurs in Tab Mix Plus and if TabX isn’t enough for you, grab Tab Mix Plus.
Some people on Digg.com mentioned this extension, which I have used before. Fasterfox lets you tweak everything I mentioned in the networking about:config and a few other options. I originally didn’t include Fasterfox because it tweaks a few things that could possibly slow down Firefox, such as the initial paint delay. On a side note, some admins on various servers started banning the Fasterfox prefetch routine and some have gone to the extent of IP banning, so be careful with what you install.
I haven’t had much time to play with this extension, but this is one powerful extension if you run your own website. I know whenever I am working on my CSS whenever I want to change some stuff up, I tend to just edit the CSS sheet and you guys take a hit whenever I screw it up, but no more! Web Developer lets you edit the CSS on the fly and you get to see the changes you make in real-time, meaning no more screw ups. Check it out if you edit lots of CSS or want to simplify your life.
Do you feel unproductive in the time it takes to mouse over to the Google search bar and search for a word that is displayed on the website you are currently viewing? Hyperwords is here to save you those additional precious seconds normally wasted by pulling up Google or using the search bar. Check it out if you want a quick way to search for words and definitions, handy if you are constantly searching for stuff.
Took some time and added two more extensions, I personally don’t use Hyperwords, but web developer is something I higly reccomend. Firefox 1.5.0.2 just released and I am finding it to be buggy in windows XP, but that could just be my overclocked processor being a pain. There is a new alpha version of Firefox out that supposedly renders faster and loads faster but I am not risking using an alpha program, I have corrupted XP twice in 5 days, don’t want to go for a third, use at your own risk. Firefox Alpha version can be found here. That wraps it up, I will update this article if anything else catches my eye, thanks for reading.
If you enjoyed this, please Digg me here.
This is a great piece. I am amazed every day with the tweaks that are possible in Firefox. Also the extensions you listed are great.
I only have a few to add.
Developer Tool Bar
Screengrab
CSS Viewer
XRay
Pearl Crescent Page Saver.
Again thanks…..also I found your site form Paul. You have a new reader!
Also….I digg it!
Thank you Bullock, I found a few errors in my article already, correcting them on the fly and adding a few pictures. I liked the Dev Tool Bar and CSS Viewer however I myself didn’t need them. Once I finish posting pictures I’ll get all the links for these extensions, might as well give other readers more options. Thanks for reading.
Thanks for the Digg, just doing my part. If any other readers have found hacks that actually work or extensions that they find increase their productivity, let me know.
I’m loving that tabx extension. I’ve been looking for something like that ever since I saw Flock do it. The fission extension is sweet too.
Nice post, Chris; I use the Tab Mix Plus extension to automatically save and restore my tab session when I close and open Firefox, so I tend to have loads of tabs open at once to remind me to go back and look at stuff. At the moment I’ve got ~40 open and FF is eating up ~193MB of RAM so I’m hoping some of these tips might help reduce that a little…
(As an aside, TMP also allows you to switch on TabX-style close buttons as well as putting a status bar indicator in a loading tab.)
Thanks, Chris! I really like the fact that when you hold your mouse over the Forward or Back buttons that it shows a little preview of the page.
Hey. This is totally irrelevent, but you don’t have anywhere else for me to put it. I think I’m going to take a welding class while in Thailand. How cool would that be? I could get really good at it and build the most amazing phase cooler things for you. I could also help out a Pi Kapp. They’d love me for it. Wouldn’t that be amazing, me learning to weld? I think it’s pretty badass.
Let’s make a deal, I learn how to weld and you will buy me a dog.
Thanks for article Chris. I have been facing the Memory issues with Firefox for quiet sometime now.
I love Fission & GSpace extensions. And thanks for telling about Tab Mix Plus.
I think Meagan rocks. You go girl!
Very cool stuff here. Thanks for posting this, I will be making these adjustments to firefox when I get home.
The TMP extension does the individual ‘X’ on each tab already, no need for an additional extension…just a FYI
TMP indeed does the individual X’s but I wasn’t a big fan of how it put individual status bars on each window as seen in my example, I personally am sticking with TabX and Fission while hoping that keeping the number of extensions low will further reduce the memory use in Firefox. However, I do like what TMP does and if I didn’t feel like it was too cluttered, I’d use it. Just showing people what their options are, both offer a great service. Off topic, Meagan does rock, but there will be no dog.
Nice Article
Steve,
http://tail-f.net/
“I guess for some people the 40-60Mb of ram that Firefox is sitting on is expensive, but for me, Firefox doesn’t get close to touching my gig of ram”
I dream about Firefox using as little as 40-60Mb of RAM. As I type this I’ve got XP’s task manager open, and Firefox is using 342Mb of my 1Gb. As you might imagine, the same urge that leads me to surf a dozen websites at once also leads me to run a number of different programs at once; in this environment, having my browser eat up a third of my total resources is a pretty big hit.
The trim-on-minimize thing helps a lot, as long as I remember to minimize FF instead of just letting it fall back in the z-order.
foobario, for Firefox to eat 342mb of ram, you must either be viewing websites with embedded programs or something is wrong. I just opened up 3 windows with 15 tabs each and Firefox is eatting 184mb memory and 182mb virtual memory. You could just use this as an excuse to bump up to 2gigs, you can never have too much ram.
Nice hacks.
Thx for the download manager hack, it was annoying.
Minimize is working for me reducing almost half memory usage.
Reveal is cool and useful.
Amazing article. A great post!
I look forward to your next. :)
Ever try the download statubar extension? Sounds like it would take care of most of your download manager issues -
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/26/
Hi,
Does anybody know how to make Firefox “snappy” on OSX. I use a PowerBook G4, but when I compare how responsive is the GUI of Firefox vs. Safari, I find Firefox slow, especially when you have more than one tab open. Does others experience the same thing?
Any suggestions?
THanks
Brave
chris - quality post. dont make a deal with meagan, she does crack
oh and check out THIS post:
http://www.thekeyissues.com/forums/129/ShowPost.aspx
Don’t listen to him. You know you want a puppy.
Glad to hear that your test went well.
I digg your article…
question - maybe you can answer. Minimize hack works great when you minimize FF - but is there a way to make “config.trim_on_(background)”. I find for my purposes I will click off of Firefox and not minmize it when switching between active windows. If FF would trim its memory usage when its simply not the active window that would be extremely useful to me. Might not be possible but just wondering…
Awesome post, you def. showed me some new tweaks here. props digg linkage. word.
Keep in mind that network.http.proxy.pipelining is only needed is you are reaching the web via a proxy (and in this case the network.http.pipelining setting is ignored).
I’m hookup with this all tweak…
I really appreciate for everything.
Lookingforward your next post.
aka
Great tips. I found these 50 best firefox extensions -
http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2005/12/50-best-firefox-extensions-for-power-surfing/
I really like the Fission extension idea, though when I install it the favicons become stretched nd that messes up the whole look of the URL is there anyway of fixing this ? or maybe its a problem between the extension theme that I am using :( *tear
U guys should try Aardvark… the power that it gives is… check it out
Great article! Thanks!
BTW, recently I found a useful FireFox extension named Hyperwords.
I use it for about 2 month. It’s very productive. It really saves time for me. No more tedious copy/paste operations if I want to lookup a word in dictionary or to email a document fragment to my friend.
https://addons.mozilla.org/addon.php?id=1941
firefox
http://mozilla.friendpages.com
my fav ff extentions
http://browseraddons.friendpages.com
For the web developers out there, I’d like to add this extension to the list:
“Web Developer”
Great utility that can show in-page breakdown of dynamic/generated content, plus on-the-fly CSS editing. Many other useful utilities and display options are available, too.
Link: http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/
This is way over my head. Forward to Daddy, the Lab might be interested. Your Mommy, I Love You
great stuff. It makes me more confortable using firefox as my primary broswer
I tried the minimize hack. I never looked before it honestly but I notice one problem that is prob just a firefox problem in general, but I had like 10 tabs open and my mem usage was about 80mb. I close all but one and my mem only droped to about 69mb. Is there something wrong in firefox that it doesnt freeup all that memory or is there a way to force it to free it?
Thanks a lot. This is really great stuff that you published here.
Ping back:
http://www.massimo-caselli.com/2006/04/16/firefox-ottimizzazione-risorse/
Compliments for your good article.
Max
Nice new Alpha version of firefox out ;-) Seems to be faster than 1.5 and render web pages better. Also seems to use less memory, using 80 Mb at the moment with 6 tabs open.
Now this version is alpha, so may be unstable and also none of the old extensions or themes work in it but its worth a look. U can get it from:
http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/bonecho/alpha1/
If you do get it, do remember to file any bugs with:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/
But obviously check for duplicate bugs first!!!
Happy browsing…. ;-)
P.s; Its got the X’s on the tabs as default now, u dont need an extension for them. :-)
Have you looked into the following settings in about:config. I have read this elsewhere and thought I should bring it to your attention since this is a Firefox tweaks article.
network.http.pipelining.firstrequest
nglayout.ititialpaint.delay
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server
Hi,
Thanks for your *great* FF page. Very helpful!
> TabX is another great productivity increaser. I know whenever I have more
> than 2 tabs open and I am trying to select the last guy or close a tab, I
> mistakenly close the tab instead of click on the correct tab, causing me to
> close an incorrect tab…
How about just middle-clicking it to close it? (If you have a wheel mouse, you can press the wheel to use it as a button.)
Cheers, ander
hello Chris,
Great site. I have a question when i go to my task manager under PF Useage it says 409 MB and CPU Useage 2-18% Is this Good-Bad?? all that i have open is 1 tab in mozilla firefox and AIM… k thanks…
bugmenot
stumbleupon
adblock filterset g
mouse gestures
those are my personal favorites
I should really check out stumbleupon considering the amount of hits I am recieving from that extension/website. Thanks for the ideas.
A great, albeit in need of updates, comparison of great firefox extensions is hosted on ExtensionsMirror.nl:
http://www.extensionsmirror.nl/index.php?showtopic=1048
I have emailed the author, GeeK canon, about updates but haven’t received a reply yet. In addition to your lists of extensions I strongly suggest adding:
Remove It Permanently
AdBlock Plus 0.7.x
Stylish (& userstyles.org)
GreaseMonkey (& userscripts.org)
Inspect This
DOM inspector (available on firefox custom install)
Xpather
MediaPlayerConnectivity
CookieCuller
Bookmark Backup
and Performancing if you like blogging but dislike your providers web posting interface
:)
Awesome site man!
I only used 2 of your hacks and i can tell the difference in the speed and quality of firefox already!
You have done the entire firefox community a huge favor with this site.
Looking forward to more post’s from you!
Awesome site man :-) Love your tweaks,because they WORK :)
keep up the good work.All the best from Norway :)
Interesting web page is, i\’ll see you later one more timeg
Excellent site, added to favorites!!b
hi
I AM IN DESPERATE NEEDS OF SOME FLOCK TWEAKS,ESPECIALLY TO INCREASE MY SPEED
PLS ANYONE HELP
Thanks for your project. I like this site. KEEP IT UP..%
342MB of ram?
how many plugins are you using?
like 200?
I would like to recommend another plugin for web development: Firebug (http://www.getfirebug.com/). Lets you change CSS on the fly for certain elements, or stylesheets. And also has a Javascript debugger. Really handy, saved me hours and hours of work…
Very good article. Now my firefox faster than ever.
Fascinating site and well worth the visit. I will be backh
Nice tweaks! thanks!
I recommend another extensions like fasterfox 2.0.0 its free, and have a simple setting than about:config.
great article here, if you want to learn how to spin an article check me out
wow… these tips are awesome.. me myself hd write some about:config thingys…
These are great tips for optimizing your Firefox experience. They sped up my browser a lot.
These tips are great for firefox. Thanks very much!