Firefox Tweaks/Tricks, necessary Updates & any Questions you like

[kashi]

Haha at the little popup, "The cache has been cleared". Good one, thanks.

I installed Fasterfox Lite the other day, seemed to speed things up a bit.

[Vajras]

Here's another handy little add-on, this time for speeding FF startup time:

[taken from: Speed Up Firefox 3.5 Startup - Extension Guru's Blog amended Nov 17

Vacuuming Your Databases (All Platforms + Firefox 3.0/3.5/3.6)

Much like your hard drive when adding and removing content, your Firefox databases can become fragmented resulting in both bloated database files as well as slow access times. places.sqlite can come become quite bloated with the recent changes to the default history time span, being raised from 9 to 90 days. This can be fixed very quickly and easily by vacuuming your Firefox databases.

Update: There is a now a Firefox Extension which does this for you.  Vacuum Places Improved will allow you to vacuum your places.sqlite  databases from within the browser. Plus it can be configured to automatically vacuum after a given number of starts or remind you (displays a vacuum in the status bar) after a given number of starts.

You should notice several things:

   * Reduction in the size of your .SQLite database files
   * Faster cold start up
   * Faster warm (restart) start up
   * Better performance from the Awesome Bar

It is recommend you vacuum your databases every few weeks or if you cleared out some of your browsing history. Mozilla is looking at way to make this an automated process. Part of the issue is Firefox needs to be closed in order to vacuum the database files. For this reason it may be become part of the update process. Once the Firefox updated is downloaded and installed the databases will be vacuumed during the restart process.

Does it work?

I can say for sure vacuuming the databases made a huge difference when I restart Firefox. All my tabs loaded nearly instantly. A couple days ago I removed the Internet Explorer Temporary files, but at time I couldn't figure out how to access my Temporary Files folder on Vista. While writing this post, I found out how to (and) remove the Windows Temporary files. I shall see next time I do a cold start up.

Also, simply disable all Firefox auto updates in the options. Of course one has to manually stay on top of updates henceforth.

[veebee]

Thanks Vajras ! my main rig has been going slow on occasions , in firefox, and annoying me very much..

just added Vacuum and BANG ! straight back to normal.

Will have a look at configuring it later, but just adding it made a huge diff straight away .

[LoneWolf_53]

Great find.   

[Furlozza]

Great find indeed +1

Makes an incredible difference to pages loading, AND FF opening itself, even on a hot re-boot

Just have mine set on "factory" options.... so will have to do it manually every so often, but it is so easy to press the icon LOL

[kashi]

Thanks Vajras. I have vacuumed the fox. +1

[kashi]

URL Link is a Firefox Add-on that adds a right click option for you to open selected text in a new Firefox window or in a new tab.

I haven't used it much yet but the few times I have it is handy and works well.
I added www.*.&com.au to the configuration options so now I can right click any selected text (*) and open it:
Unaltered
with www.*
with www.*.com
with www.*.com.au
with www.*.org
with www.*.net
with ftp.*
In Google
In Wikipedia

[Vajras]

Foxtester

[Sean]

Just started using Weather Bug (available from the 'Add-ons' function built into ff). It gives you live local weather temperature and local forecasts for the next three days. It also allows you to open a window for more in depth information such as wind speed and radar.