5 ms·
I run FF on Debian (iceweasel), and it is acceptably snappy, but there is a bit of a trick to this: 1. Every extension you add seems to decrease performance by
by tc 17y ago
I run FF on Debian (iceweasel), and it is acceptably snappy, but there is a bit of a trick to this:
1. Every extension you add seems to decrease performance by 30-50% (rough numbers) [1]. So live with a bare essential set of extensions. For me that is Firebug and FlashBlock.
2. Keeping very many bookmarks or history items seems to destroy performance, particularly with the "awesome bar." I disable history completely and have it clear everything else on browser close.
Before I settled on this FF usage technique, FF would degrade in performance over the course of months as it built up data in the profile. Eventually it would become unusable [2] until I deleted the profile and started fresh. Now I just prevent it from building up any data.
[1] As much as I used to like this extension, my experience has been that ForecastFox in particular hammers browser performance.
[2] It would take seconds, sometimes 10 or more, to open a new tab to about:blank. With this technique though, I currently have ~ 25 tabs open, and new tab creation is instantaneous.
- quoderat 17y agoOr you could just run Firefox completely in RAM in Linux, as I do: http://webupd8.blogspot.com/2009/05/speed-up-firefox-by-mounting-profile-in.html http://webupd8.blogspot.com/2009/05/speed-up-firefox-by-moun... It's fairly easy. There's a guide just for Ubuntu, too: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=991205 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=991205
- smanek 17y agoI wish the OS was smart enough to do this automatically. I have 16GB of RAM on my workstation, and rarely use more than 8GB.
- WalterGR 17y ago> Keeping very many bookmarks or history items seems to destroy performance... Amen to that. I have ~12,000 bookmarks, and FF3 on Windows takes ~10 seconds to both start up and shut down.
- Ennis 17y agoIt is exactly the same with chrome. I used to love it until it ended up being a dog in performance. I honestly thought it was because I started using the dev builds - slow debug logging? BUT, I clear everything but saved passwords every month or so. It goes back to being snappy right away. You don't get those results even with a new install as it doesn't delete old data. I think the chrome team must have known this. In the clear history dialog it lets you clear only "last week", month, etc which is perfect. I wish they would automate that though.
- jonny_noog 17y agoInteresting. I'm writing this using Iceweasel 3.0.9 on Debian testing (Squeeze/Sid) on an IBM T60 Thinkpad, 2Ghz dual-core, 2GB of RAM. I currently have 8 add-ons installed and a large amount of favourites and history saved. My profile is quite old and I never clear my history or have to do any special tending to keep performance at a constant. Iceweasel is slower to start than would be ideal, really it's always been so but certain add-ons definitely seem to affect start-up time. But I've never experienced any of these more extreme issues that I hear a large number of people reporting. Nor have I experienced these kinds of issues on any of my other machines (running Windows XP and OS X Leopard on these machines and their resources were/are similar to or better than my T60). I wonder why this is? Is it because I'm not running Iceweasel/FF on a single core machine with < 1GB of RAM? For the people who are having issues with Iceweasel/FF, what are the resources on your machines like? I totally believe you guys that these issues exist, I've read too many reports to doubt them all, I just wonder why I've never experienced them.