PaulSpoerry.com

Firefox uses SQLITE databases to store lots of its settings. By the time the databases grow and Firefox starts working slowly. 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.

SpeedyFox takes care of any database fragmentation and thus makes Firefox zippier. You might not see a difference if you try SpeedyFox on a fresh Firefox install, it works great after you have been using Firefox for some time. Just close Firefox, run SpeedyFox and point it to the profile you want to optimize.

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. If you have portable version of Firefox, choose your profile path manually by selecting “Custom…” profile. All you have to do is hit the 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.

Download SpeedyFox here.

Original post from MozillaLinks.

A year and a half after the last major Firefox release, Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is here with  a very long list of new features and improvements.

For those who have been following Firefox 3 development you may want to jump to What’s new in Release Candidate 1.

For the whole scoop, make yourself comfortable and read on.

Performance

Firefox 3 gets several performance improvement gains. Among them, profile guided optimizations (PGO) provides an optimized Firefox build based on the way it internally works. So far it is only available for Windows.

A very noticeable gain can be seen in JavaScript: it is about three times faster than Firefox 2 implementation. JavaScript is twice as important for Firefox since it is not only used in a large number of web pages but it’s also what makes Firefox UI work.

Memory wise, a much needed memory cycle collector is now in place to take care of freeing memory no longer used by modules that requested it but failed to release it properly. This and other memory oriented tweaks, seem to have paid off so far: a set of tests I recently ran suggests a noticeable increase in memory management efficiency with more memory freed as tabs and windows are closed and no mysterious memory eaten up when Firefox is kept open and idle for several hours as it has been reported several times in the past for Firefox 2.

Read the rest of this entry »