Speed up Firefox

Here is a handy tip to speed up your Firefox by cleaning up the SQLite Databases from it.

• Open Firefox.
• Open Error Console from the Tools menu.
• Paste the following command on the Code box (paste as single line)

Components.classes["@mozilla.org/browser/nav-history-service;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsPIPlacesDatabase).DBConnection.executeSimpleSQL("VACUUM");

• Hit “Evaluate” button or simply enter.

Your screen might freeze for a moment. But after you are done you SQLite databases should be less fragmented than before, which helps to speed up Firefox.

Delayed Firefox Startup on Windows

It was observed that Firefox 3.5 tends to startup too slow on Windows operating systems due to a bug that got introduced during it development stage. The browser was scanning for all temporary folders looking for information that was added by the OS itself, and other applications. For this reason, it is reported to take, even more than, a minute to start.

Firefox blogs had provided a workaround to speed up the startup, until the fix is available with the next release of the browser. Here is how you can clean the directories that it scans for (so that the scanning is pretty faster and the browser doesn’t take that long to start).

Temporary folders to clean:

XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\Local Settings\History
C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\Local Settings\Temp
C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\Local Settings\Recent

Vista:
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\History
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent
%TEMP%

Additional Info:
To delete the Internet Temporary Folders, you can open the IE browser and navigate to Tools –> Internet Options –> Browsing History –> Delete. Check all the options and chose “Delete”.

Thanks: Mozilla Links