Running Windows and want to make Firefox 4 start up faster? The add-on Start Faster enables some really nifty optimizations that Mozilla hasn’t done yet to the browser to give you a quicker launch time for your favorite browser.
Tag Archives | faster
Half Firefox 4 Start Time
Optimized Firefox for Linux?
A few days ago I introduced you to a version of Firefox that was optimized for Windows users. Today, I have something a little different. Swiftfox is another optimized build of the Firefox browser, but this time it is for Linux users to enjoy.
Optimized Firefox for Windows?
The Pale Moon Project says they can get Firefox to perform 25% faster, through the art of optimization. You see, the Pale Moon Project is all about creating a custom-built and optimized Firefox browser for Windows users to enjoy.
Speed Up Flash Videos in Firefox
Want to speed up your flash video watching? By default, Firefox takes a sort of “snapshot” of whatever you are doing every ten seconds. Why? It is so that the browser can restore itself, just in case of a crash. Now you might ask, what does this have to do with flash videos? Well, the snapshot action is what is causing your ten second delay, at times, with watching flash videos on the Web.
So what is the solution? Time to visit our good friend, the about:config…
The quick fix for this problem, at least for my own sake, is to increase the time between each of the saves performed by session restore. By opening about:config in your Firefox address bar, then typing browser.sessionstore.interval in the filter box, you’ll see a value of 10000, which is in milliseconds. (Meaning your session is saved every 10 seconds.) I changed this to 300000, or every 5 minutes, as I don’t have the urgent need for tab restoration. If you feel like being more on the safe side, try increasing it to something a bit lower, say 120000, or every 2 minutes.
I gave it a shot, and it might not be a life changing experiance after doing so, but it does seem to make the videos play faster, especially if you have several Firefox tabs or windows open at the same time.
Firefox in Wine Faster Than Native
For those of you out there that love to learn more about stats in the browser wars – here is a great post that may interest you.
After some benchmarking, it appears Firefox running in Wine is faster than the native Firefox install. To get even more geeky, they took Windows Firefox and then, “ran it on Fedora Linux using Wine 1.1.12 as provided by Fedora”.
Now how could this happen? It seems like the most popular argument is that video driver support is not as good on Linux (in comparison with Windows). You can check out the details here:
Check out the full results and let me know what you think!
TraceMonkey
Thanks to a new JavaScript engine (named TraceMonkey) it looks as if Firefox 3.1 is going to be getting a major boost in performance.
Here are the benchmarks thus far:
Be sure to check out Brendan’s Roadmap Updates for more. Also here are a few handy links from John Resig on the testing:
- SunSpider, 1.83x faster (released by the WebKit team)
- SunSpider ubench, 22.5x faster (released by the WebKit team for testing Squirrelfish)
- Image Manipulation Demo, 6.46x faster (Change the contrast and brightness of images dynamically)
- Matrix Manipulation, 6.26x faster (with the Sylvester JavaScript library)
So the big question is, will Firefox be able to make Firefox 3.1 even faster in the area of JavaScript? If you have the nightly build of Firefox 3.1 installed, you can turn TraceMonkey on by going to about:config and then toggle the javascript.options.jit.content setting from false to true. For the rest of us out there though, this is just one more surprise to look forward to once Firefox 3.1 gets rolled out to the public.
For more info, be sure to check out Firefox 3.1 to Get More JavaScript Speed Optimizations – as the CyberNet team had done a good in-depth look into this and has done the best job at making it make sense to everybody.
Firefox 3 Faster than Safari Where?
In a funny, yet surprising twist of fate it looks like the ZDNet guys found that using SunSpider JavaScript benchmark tests that Firefox 3 Beta 5 is faster than Safari 3.1… on a Mac!
That has to be a little ‘bit of an embarrassment for the Apple team but good news for all the Apple users out there that are looking forward to trying out and switching to Firefox 3 – once the final version hits the streets. Sure, the Safari wildebeests will say Firefox is only faster by a 7% margin but it is still a feather to be had in Mozilla’s proverbial cap.
Make Firefox Load Faster
Feeling like you are missing a few seconds when it comes to Firefox’s startup time? If so, you might want to take a look at the Firefox Preloader. It does exactly as you would think. Firefox Preloader is a utility that is designed to load parts of Mozilla Firefox into memory before it is used to improve the its startup time. Thanks to Daniel for submitting this one in to me.
Subscribe
Subscribe to our e-mail newsletter to receive updates.
