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Firefox is so slooooooow!

L

Littleboo

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 23, 2008
111
0
I love firefox, but it is so slow. slow in everything, loading, typing, posting. I finally went to Safari which is better but I love firefox and hate to give it up. I have done searches, it appears to be a problem, but most of the fixes are either over my head or for a pc.

My computer is not the fastest but Firefox is unbearable. OSX 10.5.8 processor 1.8 GHZ PwerPC G5 Memory 2 GB DDR SDRAM
 
I just compared Safari and FF and they are the same for me on a new MBP. Does FF use more resources typically?
 
are you running it loaded with plug-ins and addons or bare?, you could throw more ram in your machine, 2gb on a G5 isnt much ;)
 
Firefox went through a spell of taking forever to start and quit for me. It was just as fast as Safari once it started, but it could take 15-20 seconds or more to get started and the same to quit. The latest Firefox update seemed to fix this behavior.
 
mine runs fine. but like any version of fire fox either on OSX or Windows its a huge memory hog.

the only qualms with FF i have on OSX is it takes forever to launch on some occasions. ihave zero add-ons and even cleared cache etc.
 
Just sorted the very same issue on my sons Pb g4. I basically removed all traces of firefox from his machine then installed the latest version after a reboot. It's all working fine now
 
Head into the folder "~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/<some_alnum_text>.default" (where ~/ is your home directory), check out the size of any files ending in "sqlite" and post them here. I've noticed that these files tend to grow really large with the default FF settings and can slow things down quite a bit.
 
I am maxed in ram.

I have 3 add on. google toolbar, firebug, SEO blogger

don't have this ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox

How do you remove all traces? will I loose all my information? I know how to backup bookmarks, but is there anything else I should save?
 
What model is your G5 and what version of Firefox are you using? The folder may be at ~/Library/Firefox instead. Yes, you will lose some information if you need to delete the files but, assuming you don't delete random things in the folder before posting the file sizes, it will mostly be your history. You could also see what Firefox is currently storing for your history. Type "about:config" in your address bar and search for keys that begin with "browser.history_expire". You will end up with some (or all) of the below settings:

(The defaults here are all assuming Firefox 3.x)
browser.history_expire_days, Default: 180
browser.history_expire_days.mirror, Default: 180
browser.history_expire_days_min, Default: 90
browser.history_expire_sites, Default: 40000
browser.history_expire_visits, Default: 20000

Most of these are set to rather insane defaults which tend to make the "places.sqlite" balloon (mine was up to 100MB+ at one point) and can severely impact the browser. Turning things down helped me quite a bit, my history DB usually never gets above 6MB or so (using 30,30,15,4000,2000 respectively). There may be other ways to tweak it as well if it turns out your history is not causing the problems. Also, see how much free RAM you have and keep track of what other programs you are using at the time. I've seen Firefox break the 250MB barrier easily with only a few pages open so if you're using several memory heavy programs, that could be contributing to the slowdown.
 
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