So, what is the magic going on behind this add-on? Start Faster bypasses the Windows prefetch feature to get Firefox up and running faster.  When running Firefox on Windows, the default way of doing things is to call several things up at the operating system level (such as DLL libraries). Since these are not 100% needed, all the Start Faster add-on has to do is ignore this step of the start up process.

A “Faster Firefox” shortcut is added to your desktop to start launching Firefox with this idea in mind, after you install the add-on.  So, if you want to go back to starting the old fashion way – you can do so via your regular shortcut icon. Overall you should see your Firefox start up time be about two times faster than without.

You can pick up the Start Faster add-on for Firefox 4 from the Firefox Add-ons website.

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.

Built from the most cutting edge Firefox source code available, Swiftfox has builds for both AMD and Intel processors. Here is a little ‘bit more about the browser from the developers:

There is now an installer available that is distro independent. It is a script that downloads and installs Swiftfox in the /opt directory and attempts to use existing Firefox plugins. The installer is probably the best way for most users to install Swiftfox. If your distro is Debian based you will want to install using the deb files as the apt repository will provide automatic updating. More info is available at the deb file page.

You should also be able to use all of your old favorite Firefox plugins, with no additional configurations needed.  I think this is a fantastic alternative to your basic Firefox browser, and if you are a Linux user – you should definitely check it out.

You can learn more about Swiftfox over at getswiftfox.com.

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.

Are you interested? Here are a few more features Pale Moon has:

• Highly optimized for current processors
• 100% Firefox sourced: As safe as the browser that has seen years of development.
• Uses slightly less memory because of disabled redundant and optional code
• Significant speed increases for page drawing and script processing
• Support for SVG and Canvas
• Support for Firefox extensions, themes and personas

You can also get more geeky details on the differences on Pale Moon’s Technical Details page.

Now for my word of warning. The way this works is you install Pale Moon’s own version of Firefox, and use it – rather than the default Mozilla browser. I have not tried this yet myself, because I am not sure if it stands alone as it’s own browser or over-rides the default Firefox browser.

If you give it a shot – please leave your reviews in the comments!  Also, big thanks goes out to Ramadas from our Facebook Fan Page who gave me the suggestion to check this neat download out in the first place.  You can learn more about Pale Moon over at palemoon.org.

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.

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:

• Browser benchmarks 2: even Wine beats Linux Firefox

Check out the full results and let me know what you think!

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.

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.

[Learn More About the Firefox Preloader!]