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.
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.
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!
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O000o jadi kalo portable gak terregistry ya…OK saya harus coba speedy
I would strongly suggest not using this product if one is using Delicious bookmarks addon. It royally screwed up the keywords for my delicious bookmarks in Firefox. Had to restore from a backup.
Thanks Ray.. This works perfectly and does in fact speed up FF.. I use it at least 2x’s weekly.
If you are on a mac just run the following in your terminal
cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/for f in */*.sqlite; do sqlite3 $f ‘VACUUM;’; don
Does the same optimization.
Yes, it’s really speed up my Firefox..
It works well. Thank
btw my ff is closed while running the speedyfox.help me please..
i’m having problem w/ the speedyfox which says.. “Failed to open the profile, please close all Firefox instances before”.help please..tnx
Downloaded fine. Installed fine. Didn’t trash Firefox (like 3.5 did!) However, made no improvement whatsoever to speed :-(
thanks ray for sharing this, I’m still using firefox 3.0.13 bec. firefox 3.52 is kinda slow… now i can try how improvement will it be… ^^
Raymond,
If I clean the Firefox cash, cookies, history, etc… do I have the same results?
Today I try Opera 10 in a old computer, and I notice a big difrerence in performance to firefox, Opera is faster.
Raymond,
Thank you very much for speeding up my Firefox!
By the way… Raymond, do you speak Polish? ‘cos Max apparently thinks you do, so do you?
You know what, it actually works. Thanks for the tip, Mr R.
thanks, will give it a try on my netbooks
is it ok to put a link to ure great site ?
I have a lot of FF users on my site and some have said about slower response times in FF.
so i used the software you recommended.
WoW its great.
cheers raymond.
site now bookmarked.
Raymond, it works great!! Thanks for the info and software.
@ Mart
raymond.cc/blog/archives/2009/08/27/100-bitdefender-internet-security-2010-genuine-license-key-giveaway-to-subscribers/
Raymond jesteś naprawdę ok
This works great Raymond.I was considering deleting Firefox and reinstalling it again.
I use ff pretty much all the time and agreed it has over time starting to start up a lot slower then when i first installed.
i have few addons included with it maybe5-6 that i use so that might slow the start up a bit.
But i tried the portable version of this app and have to say there was an instant improvement on start up time,it was very fast to load up the broswer and the default page i have.
tabbing pages works fast also,overall i would say it has definitely made firefox load times a quicker.
thanks for the info and the links too the app.
Thanks once more Ray
you have got no idea how much usefull are your blogs and how much people can learn,
I ‘m spreading the site among all friends here in Zambia.
Thanks very much
Actually for me, there was a sginificant slowdown of both on startup and loading pages.
I tried running it twice and I see a performance hit.
Is there any way to reverse the changes ?
Will unistalling Firefox and reinstall again solve the problem ?
thnx raymond. it is of great help.
thanks Raymond..its great..Raymond always rocks………
When is raymond going to announce the winners of the BIS 2010??
Thanks Ray
thanks raymond it worked on win xp home ( dell 32 bit os) and vista home premium ( 64 bit)
Thank You !
Works great :-)
Thanks Raymond .. downloaded it
Wow…It’s really work for me.. :D My firefox is faster than before. Thanks for the great share Raymond.
thanks raymond this will speedup my firefox ^^
@Litschi: That’s what I said at the end of the article.
never used any other browser other than ff. thanks mate, cheers!
Won’t work with portable firefox :-(
Nice!;)
thx raymond
Ill try ray. I’m sure it will work.
I’m not huge fan of firefox, but i still keep it on my computer as second option. I tested speedyfox and i cant see differens on startup, but opening pages comes faster and better response time is noticeable.