By Peter Butler
(3/31/06)
Everybody who's experienced the fun of customizing Firefox to his or her liking has a favorite extension. Whether it's the improved navigation and session-saving friendliness of TabMixPlus or the convenience of All-in-One Sidebar, I can't imagine living without some of them. It's empowering to tweak your browser as you see fit, but the price often comes in the form of slower performance and memory hogging. Though Firefox has long been accused of leaking memory, there are simple ways to reduce RAM usage and increase speed. Here are a few extensions and tips designed to lighten your load.
If you haven't tried the Firefox browser, get it here.
PDF Download
Adobe Acrobat files (PDFs) can be a major source of Firefox sluggishness. When a plug-in like Acrobat Reader is loaded in Firefox, it isn't unloaded until you quit the browser. This helpful extension will ask whether you want to open a PDF file in Firefox, translate it to HTML (via Google), download it locally, or cancel the link.
NoScript
One of the biggest complaints against Firefox is how it handles JavaScript. This invaluable extension blocks all Java and JavaScript by default, then lets you add sites to your whitelist as you surf. If you're the micromanaging type, this one's for you.
FlashBlock
On the opposite pole from NoScript is the simple, yet beautiful, FlashBlock. It replaces all Flash movies with play buttons that give you control over when or whether the movie plays. Even if you don't care about enhancing browser performance, it's a great tool for saner surfing. However, it doesn't function with NoScript enabled, and I suspect that many of my recent browser crashes may be related to FlashBlock.
FireTune
This executable is not an extension, but rather a collection of optimization settings that can be automatically configured with Firefox. Simply input your computer and connection speeds, and FireTune does the rest. It won't likely reduce memory usage, but it should speed up your browsing, especially on lower-end systems.
Control animations with about:config
If you've never used about:config, you're missing out. Type about:config into your Firefox address bar and hit Enter. One easy configuration change is limiting animated images. Double-click image.animation_mode and change it to none to stop all animated images, or once to let them run through once. You can revert to the default behavior with normal.
Clean up downloads
Does Firefox ever stall slightly when you begin to download a file? One possible problem could be that you've got more completed downloads than the Firefox Download Manager can handle. Hit Ctrl+J to bring up your recent downloads, and if you've got more than 20, clean them out.
Back-Forward cache
Back to the about:config screen: Firefox has a special "Back-Forward cache" for recently visited pages that works differently than the regular browser cache. The default setting for browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers, "-1," will save up to 8 pages if you have more than 512MB RAM on your PC. Reduce the number to zero for maximum memory savings.
Zap and other bookmarklets
It's not an extension, but one of my favorite ways of disabling annoying scripts, plug-ins, and event handlers to improve performance is the Zap bookmarklet, which I found via the excellent Jesse's Bookmarklets site. Bookmarklets are small JavaScript programs that can be saved as bookmarks. Simply drag the Zap link into your Bookmarks Toolbar and hit it whenever you want to kill annoyances on Web pages.
(Note that the "Zap" links above don't take you anywhere; they simply remove background images, scripts, etc.)
Disable/uninstall extensions
Yes, Greasemonkey and Platypus are extremely cool to play around with, but how much do you actually use them? Are you OK with restarting Firefox every time you want to use Gmail Space? For faster performance, disable extensions you don't use often, and uninstall those you never use. Don't be this guy.
Start in Safe Mode
For Firefox and Thunderbird, Mozilla enables a Safe Mode that loads the application without themes or extensions. If you've lost the included shortcut, you can start in Safe Mode by clicking the Windows Start button, then selecting Run, and entering "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -safe-mode. If you notice a dramatic improvement, it's likely an extension or theme that's slowing you down. Disable them one by one until you find the culprit.
