Optimize Firefox with Firetune

Firetune for Firefox Mozilla Firefox seems to be bloated that it has become slower. Maybe it’s because of all those themes and plugins we all install. My Firefox have over a dozen active add-ons already and perhaps these 3rd party extensions are the ones making the browser a little buggy than ever.

However, I heard from the latest episode of Cranky Geeks that Firefox was built with the intention to be optimized for slow systems and even slower internet connection.

So, instead of tweaking the browser configs manually (by typing about:config in the address bar), here’s their recommendation:

FireTune for Firefox

FireTune for Mozilla Firefox v1.x / 2.x was developed for an easy and fast optimization of your browsing experience with Firefox. It is based on a collection of popular and well working optimization settings used and tested by the experts. Usually you have to optimize Firefox manually, which can be time consuming and difficult for the novice user. FireTune helps you here – it includes all the performance optimizations. The only thing you must do is: make your selection. FireTune does the work for you.

According to your specific computer speed and internet connection speed, FireTune will optimize several internal settings of Firefox for better performance. FireTune does NOT modify the Firefox executable, or any other Firefox binary file. Everything can be undone easily provided you saved your original profile configuration file with FireTune’s profile backup feature before.

That issue about the Firefox memory leak/bug isn’t actually a bug but a feature as it caches a lot of historical pages — To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigations are renavigations to pages visited less than 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox 1.5 implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last five session history entries for each tab. This is a lot of data. If you have a lot of tabs, Firefox’s memory usage can climb dramatically. It’s a trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the web. {source}

You can download FireTune here and after apply all settings to “fast computer/fast connection”, I actually noticed a lot of improvements in the browser especially when loading pages. But don’t take my word for it. Best try it yourself and see the difference.

On another note, Mozilla wants to rebrand FireFox to increase the poor retention rate of 25%. I personally believed the AdSense referral program has hand in the low retention performance. A lot of webmasters are pushing Firefox for the wrong reason and downloaders end up not actually using the software. I’ve seen a lot of forums waving the Firefox+Google Toolbar banners and asking members to download and install it (it’s legal to promote it since AdSense referrals are PPA).

Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

https://www.yugatech.com

7 Comments

peejay says:

17 years ago

downloaded it and tried it out. as what dave starr mentioned, it does feel a bit faster.
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Dave Starr --- ROI Guy says:

17 years ago

An update. I did run FireTune right after I commented yesterday. I also looked over my plug-ins and deleted 6 of them that I wasn’t even using.

I did not make a scientific tests but with those plug-ins gine and FireTune, FireFox certainly “feels” faster. In particular the annoying lag between clicking on a tab and FF changing to that tab is noriceably faster, so it’s well worth the price.
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dwek says:

17 years ago

most of the time when I use firefox on xp, it eats 60k++ of memory… I think more tabs means more memory.
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jhay says:

17 years ago

No proplems with Firefox on my Ubuntu box too. But on my XP machine, I now use Safari because it loads faster and eats up less memory.
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Jaypee says:

17 years ago

I’ve tried and used FireTune a long time ago but I didn’t see any difference or change in startup time and page loading time. I eventually gave up and uninstalled it.

Dave is right. Firefox is indeed slow at times but not really that bad. I have no problems with Firefox installed on my laptop which runs Ubuntu. It loads and renders pages fine.
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Dave Starr --- ROI Guy says:

17 years ago

Nice to see this, thanks. I’m going to give it a try right away. FireFox has been a bit like the Emperor’s Clothes fable … don’t get me wrong, I love using FF, but it is _slow_. It’s slow even with one window open … I believe you even posted about that here, also, Abe a couple months back. In actual tests FF rendereing the same page as IE was as bad as 10 times slower. The FF “evangelists” spend so much time saying bad things about IE they have been unable to face the truth about their favorite product. Admitting faults and even more important, trying to correct them is actually doing a favor for the product.

Interestingly enough just today I have been in an email conversation with none other than the Evil One … John Chow. I have badgered him for months about anoying lines that show up in the comments on his blog and John has finally confirmed this is a problem that can only be reproduced in FireFox … that other great satan, Internet Explorer, renders John’s theme exactly as it is suposed to to look.
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