Optimize Firefox with Firetune

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).