Firefox outperforming Internet Explorer and Chrome
Mozilla Firefox has been outperforming Internet Explorer for a number of years, and its latest version is even faster than ever. However, there is a new, lean, free web browser on the block which runs web pages at lightning speed. It goes by the name of Google Chrome. Google released the source code of Chrome, including its custom JavaScript engine as an open source project entitled Chromium.
Tweak the right settings and with some experimentation, Firefox can keep pace with Google Chrome. Unknown to many of its users, Firefox has a raft of options that can unleash the browser’s true potential. With just a few minutes of your time, you can make your daily web browsing more enjoyable. Even if your system has a state of the art Intel Core i7, AMD Opteron, or AMD Phenom processor, optimization is still worth exploring.
Many of the following tips are not Linux specific. So this article will hopefully be of interest to users of a wide variety of operating systems including Sun Microsystems’ Solaris, Microsoft’s XP, Vista and 7, as well as Apple’s Mac OS X, and other UNIX clones.
We would recommend you backup your Firefox settings (stored in the prefs.js file) before experimenting with the tips set out in this article.
1) Install BleachBit
The first tip involves installing BleachBit. This software is included in Ubuntu and Debian repositories, and there is also an installation package available for Windows.
BleachBit deletes junk to recover disk space, improves start up times and maintain privacy. It offers both a simple PyGTK GUI and a command line interface for automation.
The software eliminates old junk from your system including cache, Internet history, temporary files, unused locale files (better than localepurge), logs, and cookies. It wipes clean 50 applications including Firefox (as well as OpenOffice.org, Opera, Real Player, Skype, Adobe Reader, Google Chrome and Chromium, Google Toolbar, Sun Java, and more). Besides improving Firefox’s responsiveness it also shreds files so that they cannot be recovered, wipes free disk space to hide insecurely deleted files.
It is a handy utility that performs a number of different tasks for Firefox. In particular:
Cache: Web cache reduces time to display revisited pages.
Cookies: HTTP cookies contain information such as web site prefereneces, authentication, and tracking identification
Download history: List of files downloaded
Form history: A history of forms entered in web sites and in the Search bar
Passwords: A database of usernames and passwords as well as a list of sites that should not store passwords
Places: A database of URLs including bookmarks and a history of visited web sites
Session restore: Loads the initial session after the browser closes or crashes
URL history: List of visited web pages
Vacuum: Clean database fragmentation to reduce space and improve speed without removing any data. Since Firefox 3.0, bookmarks, history and most storage is kept in SQLite databases. As any other database, SQLite databases become fragmented over time and empty spaces appear. Over time the fragmentation causes a performance hit.
Continue reading about the other steps over at LinuxLinks