Mozilla Firefox is by far the best feature-rich and fastest browser out there, but with the passage of time it slows down considerably. It will take a lot of time to load during startup, the overall speed will be effected, and browsing Histories will be too slow. This is very common problem and it occurs largely because of fragmentation of databases. Starting from Firefox version 3, the development team has made Firefox to use SQLite databases to store information.
optimize firefox database
If you go to your Firefox profile folder, you should see a bunch of files ending with .sqlite extension. There are a total of 10 sqlite databases which is content-prefs.sqlite, cookies.sqlite, downloads.sqlite, formhistory.sqlite, places.sqlite, permissions.sqlite, search.sqlite, signons.sqlite, urlclassifier3.sqlite and webappsstore.sqlite. Searching the Internet reveals a lot of guides and even Firefox addons that can automatically “vacuum” or optimize Firefox database but most of them only does it on the places.sqlite database file which is the main culprit for a crawling slow Firefox.

It works but wouldn’t it be better if we can optimize ALL of the Firefox databases? Thanks to SpeedyFox we can now do that.

SpeedyFox is a brand new small utility that fixes this problem with a single click! It seems unbelievable but after you optimize your Firefox with this tool, you will get a fresh newly-installed feel because the speed indeed gets considerably faster. You will get up 3 times faster startup speed, browsing history will become faster, and performing operations with cookies will be quicker than before.

speedyfox optimize firefox sqlite database

Once installed, SpeedyFox automatically detects your Firefox’s default profile. If you have more than one profile, you can select the one you want to optimize from the drop-down menu. All you have to do is select the default profile that you want to optimize and hit Speed Up Firefox button. The optimization process can take anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour depending on how large your databases are. The whole optimization process is safe as it does not effect your history, bookmarks, passwords, etc.

There are 2 versions of SpeedyFox, the installer and the portable version. I personally prefer the portable version so it doesn’t add any information to the registry and runs from anywhere. It is free and currently only works on Windows. Soon there will be versions that runs on Mac and also support of portable Firefox. Make sure you close your Firefox browser first before clicking the “Speed Up My Firefox” button from SpeedyFox!

[ Download SpeedyFox ]

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