The speed of a Web browser is like your salary and your looks - it can make you really unhappy if it's bad, but if it's good, it's never quite good enough.
Letting Firefox use disk space as a cache for the various images, cookies, files and bits of digital dreck that make up pieces of your favorite Web pages, pour all that stuff into memory instead.
On one hand it's logical. Data written to and read from disk is a lot slower than the same data coming out of RAM. And, memory is relatively cheap.
On the other hand, doesn't Firefox eat up enough memory as it is? How much do you want to give it?
There are several ways to add RAMdisk space and make it work with Firefox, and several ways to explain how to do it. If you hack your own gear a lot to make it run faster, know how to overclock without melting anything and not only have a sniffer, but know what to do with it, read this one.
If you don't live in your mom's basement, try this alternative.
Of course, you could always switch to a faster browser, like Chrome, even though it doesn't support most of the Add-Ons you've come to rely on and would expand the amount you rely on Google even though it's already creepy how much they know about you and how much you use them even though you'd rather not.
Google is coming out with a version it promises will keep you from being so neurotic about its plans to control the world and lose weight in the process.
When you launch the browser it opens the Hypnotoad web site and then just leaves you there until you starve
Or you could download the latest beta (9) of Firefox 4, whose JaegerMonkey JavaScript engine, enhanced HTML5 support and the inclusion of WebGL hardware-supported graphics capabilities make it blazingly fast compared to earlier versions.
It also has a built-in sync feature that will replicate all your bookmark and profile data on your smartphone, laptop, desktop, USB PC-on-a-stick and kiosk-accessed virtual desktop so you can log in to TooManyComputersAnonymous.com from wherever you are.
Quick Tips for Speeding Up Firefox
Recently I noticed that whenever I downloaded a file in Firefox, the program turned into molasses--especially just after the download finished. The browser would literally freeze up for seconds at a time for about a minute after.
On a whim, I opened up the Downloads list (accessible by pressing Ctrl-J). It was pretty lengthy; I hadn't cleared it in as long as I could remember. Admittedly, I just never bothered, as I didn't think it necessary. Also on a whim, I clicked Clear List, which wiped the slate clean, so to speak. (This doesn't delete your downloads, but merely Firefox's record of them.)
You know what? The next time I downloaded a file, Firefox hummed along like its regular speedy self. No hangs, no delays. I'm not sure why this made the difference, but it definitely did. If you're encountering a similar issue, I recommend trying the same procedure.
Remove Old Versions of the Java Console From Firefox
Java, of course, is the programming language/platform that's used by various Web sites and apps--you know, the thing that's constantly nagging you to install updates.
Every time you do so, Firefox inherits a new version of the Java Console (a debugging tool that's useless to the vast majority of users). Unfortunately, the old ones don't get deleted. Does that impact Firefox performance? I don't know for sure, but it can't help--and I do know I don't want half a dozen Java Consoles cluttering things up!
If you look at your Firefox Add-ons list (by selecting Tools, Add-ons), you may indeed see several instances of Java Console. However, you'll also notice that the uninstall button for each one is greyed out. How can you remove the old Consoles?
Simple: Exit Firefox, then run it as an administrator. To do so, right-click your Firefox desktop icon, then choose Run as administrator. Now, when you go back to the Add-ons list, you'll have the option of uninstalling Java Consoles.
You can probably get rid of them all, though I recommend keeping the one with the highest version number, just in case the Java Runtime Environment needs it for some reason.
Make Firefox Immediately Switch to a Newly Opened Tab
Normally, when you click a link that opens a new tab (or hold down the Ctrl key while clicking a link, which forces a new tab to open), Firefox doesn't actually switch to that tab. It keeps you where you were. That doesn't make a ton of sense. After all, why would you open a new tab if you didn't want to view it right away?
Fortunately, there's an easy way to change Firefox's behavior when it comes to new tabs: Click the Tools menu, then Options, and then click Tabs. Enable the last option in the list: When I open a link in a new tab, switch to it immediately. (Pretty straightforward, huh?) Click OK and you're done.
Speed up the launch of Firefox 4
If you have a lot of tabs that open when you start Firefox, you're probably used to Firefox taking forever to load. The slow load time happens because Firefox loads up the page in each tab, and you need to wait for all of them to finish loading before Firefox becomes reasonably responsive again.
Firefox 4 has a new configuration setting that can make Firefox load a lot faster in this situation. In fact, with the default setting, it will already load faster. But you can make it faster still.
To change this setting, type about:config in the address bar and click past the warning. Then find the preference named browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs. This setting, which is 3 by default, determines how many tabs will load at one time in the background.
So if you want to really speed things up, you can set this to a lower value, like 0, by doubling clicking on it. If you set it to 0, that means that no tabs will load until you click on them.
Conversely, if you want to get the old behavior back, like in Firefox 3, where it loads up all the tabs at once, you can set this value to be very high.
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