Yesterday I covered some of the hacks you could do to Firefox to improve performance. For today, I have a few more sites worth checking out for performance hacks, and I have some information to cover about some other aspects of browser performance than mere speed.
But first off, here are a couple links to sites which have some well written descriptions of how to hack your Firefox browser to speed up a wide variety of the actions it performs when loading up a web page.
How to Double Firefox Speed
http://www.pctipsbox.com/how-to-double-firefox-speed/
12 Tricks to Increase Your Firefox Speed by a Noticeable Amount
http://www.tutzone.org/2009/01/increase-firefox-speed-by-10-30x.html
With this ‘under the hood’ perspective covered well enough there are a few Firefox plugins worth checking out…
Speed Dial creates an array of tiles websites to load up which is similar to comparable presentations of web sites in Google Chrome or Apple’s Safari.
Speed DNS is a plugin which pre-fetches links from a web page before you even consider clicking it. It is supposed to work in the background to simplify some of the DNS services actions when loading a page…
And I also have found Fasterfox (and plugin I haven’t tried out yet…) which looks like it makes many of the same changes you could do manually by hacking Firefox…
At this point there are some other types of plugins worth looking into. One of the other performance aspects of using a browser which more people want relates to Security and Privacy. There are plugins related to online initiatives to make surfing safer (Web of Trust), there are anonymous browsing add-ons which provide the sites you go to with almost no information, there are similar plugins which disable all tracking cookies, and so on.
10+ Best Firefox Security and Privacy Add-ons
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/best-firefox-addons-for-enhancing-security-and-privacy
Five must-have security/privacy extensions for Firefox
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13739_3-9784163-46.html
Top 10 Best Firefox Security Add-ons
http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=5805&review=Top+10+Best+Firefox+Security+Add-ons
Yeah, I have tried (and still experiment with) a number of Firefox hacks. This is not an exact science in that every computer (CPU, GPU, memory, and HD) has different characteristics, the same goes for the type and speed of access you might have. In essence, there is no ideal answer for every set up.
Mozilla sets up Firefox with what could be called pretty conservative settings (to ensure that it works well for everyone). So, there are likely quite a few mods you could do to your setup. Before you get too involved, I would suggest backing up your Firefox setup using MozBackup (http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com ). This will give you a backup to use in case some of the experiments go bad…
From some of the links in the post, there are some good places to start with speeding up your Firefox install.
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