We witnessed how Mozilla Firefox evolved and surpassed even that of MS’s Internet Explorer. Today, Firefox’s browser, version 3.5, is even more powerful providing helpful features to its users. Of course, it should be understood that nothing is a “perfect world”. Each time we see something good, worse things are not far behind.
Slow internet surfing
As for Firefox, it’s performance is lessened because of fragments caused by larger default history size. You see, earlier versions of Firefox browser set the default history time to 9 days. But since the upgrade to 3.0 this was increased to 90 days. This means each time you surf the net, web pages will be stored in your browser for 90 days. For some users this would be OK, however, other internet users would notice a downgrade on their browser’s performance. In other words, your surfing experience will be S…L…O…W…E…D.
How to speed up?
There are a couple of things Mozilla provided to do a “vaccuum” in order to do a housekeeping on your firefox browser and speed things up.
1. You can change the number of days your browser caches the web pages.
Go to Tools –> Options, click the Privacy tab and from History area choose, from the “drop-down” tool bar, Use custom settings for history. Here, you can see the default period was set to 90 days. You could change the period to your liking. I usually choose 10 days.
2. Mozilla previously provided steps to “vaccuum” your browser’s SQLite database. This will optimized your browser’s database and remove fragments caused by bookmarks, history and other storages made. The problem was that there are “too many” things to do and for most people this could be a daunting task.
That is why, Mozilla provided a simpler way to vaccuum your system. Here are the steps you could alternately do to perform above procedure.
- Open the Error Console: go to Tools –> Error Console
- In the Code text box paste this:
Components.classes["@mozilla.org/browser/nav-history-service;1"].getService
(Components.interfaces.nsPIPlacesDatabase).DBConnection.executeSimpleSQL("VACUUM");
- Press Evaluate. Your browser will “freeze” for a while. (Don’t worry it will only take a moment).
3. You could also clear your browser’s cache, history , cookies etc. from time to time. Go to Tools –> Clear recent history. You could also press CTRL+ SHIFT + DEL key. Press the Clear now tab to initiate the process.
After doing these , you could see and feel the “change” in your browsing speed. I guess it is similar with the feel of my PC after reformatting and installing my OS.
There you have it folks. Do the procedures above so you don’t have to do this….
Again.
source:(lifehacker, mozilla)
You might also like
Tags: accelerate internet surfing, clear caches, cookies, database, downgrade in speed, fragments, history, How to speed your firefox browser, mozilla firefox
