How to speed Firefox up

Covert0ne · 4 Aug 2011 at 16:57

Chiz said:
....or you can just start using Chrome.

*shudders*

slylittlefox · 4 Aug 2011 at 18:58

How to speed Firefox up

... install Chrome

Firefox lost its way a long time ago.

slylittlefox · 4 Aug 2011 at 19:00

xibinim said:
Does Chrome have many decent extensions?

Pretty much every major/popular extension for FF exists for Chrome

Mattus · 4 Aug 2011 at 19:04

All of those "tips" are either outdated or bogus. Don't you think that if they improved performance without significant side-effects then they would have been on by default?

slylittlefox said:
Pretty much every major/popular extension for FF exists for Chrome

Untrue. Find me a good equivalent of DownThemAll or FireFTP for Chrome, for example. You can't - because Chrome extensions don't integrate deeply enough into the browser to allow it.

NuclearWinter · 4 Aug 2011 at 19:30

I actually prefer Chrome as a browser overall, but I'm mostly using FF right now specifically because there are extensions I need which aren't currently possible in Chrome due to limitations.

Mattus · 4 Aug 2011 at 19:32

Firefox is a very powerful platform, which is both its strength and its weakness. It makes complex extensions possible, but also means that Firefox feels "heavy" and is loaded down with lots of ancient code which seems to exist for compatibility reasons!

dante6491 · 4 Aug 2011 at 23:20

Mattus said:
Firefox is a very powerful platform, which is both its strength and its weakness. It makes complex extensions possible, but also means that Firefox feels "heavy" and is loaded down with lots of ancient code which seems to exist for compatibility reasons!

They are trying to fix that. In synthetic benchmarks Chrome and Firefox are not actually that far apart in terms of speed, but Chrome feels quicker when in use. Versions 6-8 of FF are meant to dramatically improve on this. Version 9 onwards is rumoured to have another new UI.