Mozilla FireFox

[MrFlibble]

I'm sure some of this is rather common knowledge, but I found the following tips on boosting Firefox performance useful:

Settings to Speed-up Firefox for Each System Configuration (note that you might need to create some of the preference entries in about:config)

Optimize Firefox’s memory usage by tweaking session preferences (exactly what it says on the tin)

How to reduce the memory usage on Firefox?

Reduce Memory Usage In Firefox

BTW, apparently, I'm not the only one who has problems with PDF files in Firefox, here's the article that addresses the issue:

How to prevent PDF's from freezing FireFox?

[athanasios]

But in many cases you have to sacrifice functionality. For example this suggestion:

* don't use more than 5 extensions

in pretty useless.

Thanks for links. I will try some of them. Anyway it is wise to clear history automatically when you exit FF-including those of the LSO cookies you don't really need(extension required: 'BetterPrivacy').

[MrFlibble]

These also seem to be useful:

SOLVED: Firefox high CPU load with plugin-container

Stop Plugin-Container in Firefox 4

[athanasios]

Thanks a lot. Using my old PC now with only 512MB RAM. Going to stop it. FF + Pl. Cont ~ 200MB. Let me fix it and see.

[MrFlibble]

You could also try allocating less RAM for browser cache to reduce strain on memory by changing the browser.cache.memory.capacity parameter. By default, Firefox auto-detects memory cache size depending on total amount of RAM, but you can set it up for any fixed value you wish.

BTW, I fixed the PDF problem I mentioned above by simply turning off the Adobe plug-in.

[athanasios]

Thanks. are you using a google docs plugin?

[MrFlibble]

Nope, I don't. I've only dealt with GoogleDocs a few times when some articles I looked for were archived there.

[Andrew]

Firefox 5 Released

Release Notes

Better than 4. Fixes some problems and improved speed. Seems to be converging with Chrome (can't tell the difference between the two).

[MrFlibble]

Upgraded. It really seems to be noticeably faster. Thanks for the info! :)