Surfing the internet is the main topic of this blog and the reason why I often insist with tricks, guides and advice on how to use programs to view websites, ie browsers. The most used browser in the world is still Internet Explorer but only because it is pre-installed in Windows and because non-expert people think it is the only existing browser.
The wisest people have long since abandoned Internet Explorer by choosing to navigate with Google Chrome, my favorite that I consider better than the others, Opera, the fastest, and Firefox, the most attentive to privacy.
Firefox, however, has some obvious flaws, that is, when you start it, you have to wait a bit, with a rather slow loading of the program which, personally, annoys me a lot.
If we want to understand why Firefox takes so long to open and, above all how to speed up this initial loading, here are some tips.
READ ALSO: How to speed up Firefox on PC
In that article, in addition to several settings to be modified, some add-ons are also reported which speed up Firefox immediately.
These include: SpeedyFox .
Otherwise you might decide to use an optimized version of Firefox, like Palemoon faster than the original Firefox.
In principle, however, even by installing these addons, something more can be done.
1) It is absolutely necessary to disable installed addons and extensions that are not used on a daily basis.
The smaller the load and the fewer extensions need to be loaded, the faster the browser will run.
Then go to the menu Tools -> Add-ons -> extensions and remove the addons that are never or almost never used.
2) One thing that worries a lot in Firefox is how add-ons or extensions are uninstalled .
In fact, many add-ons, after their installation, create new preferences menus inside the prefs.js file in the profile folder of the browser.
These parameters define values for custom settings, which the user can change directly from the extension's options menu.
The problem is that after uninstalling an add-on, the file containing the preferences is not cleaned up.
Firefox simply ignores the custom preferences created by the uninstalled components and remains in the prefs.js file.
After putting in and removing so many extensions, this file gets bigger and bigger and Firefox takes longer and longer to load.
You must then clean up this configuration file and delete the obsolete entries .
This cleaning can be done manually by opening the prefs.js file located (on Windows 7) in the folder C: \ Users \ user \ AppData \ Roaming \ Mozilla \ Firefox \ Profiles \ w4rddjk1.default .
More easily, you can do this Firefox profile cleaning using the Firefox Prefs.js Cleaner tool which makes a list of all the entries and allows you to remove the ones that you recognize as obsolete, with a click.
Be careful what you delete because, in case of errors, Firefox may stop working properly and will have to be reinstalled from the beginning.
3) Clear the history of sites visited in the past.
In case you are not used to checking the history of past browsing, which, in my opinion, rarely happens, it is better to greatly reduce the memory space of the history or, better yet, empty it completely every time you close Firefox .
The options are in the Tools menu -> Options -> Privacy in which you can choose not to save the history or to customize the space reserved for it (I would not put more than 10 days).
4) A general and obvious advice to speed up the startup of Firefox is to not restore the tabs left open in the last session.
In this case, however, there is a solution to load all the open tabs more quickly with the Fast Tab Switcher addon.
5) An interesting idea to speed up browser startup is to preload Firefox in the background when Windows starts as explained in another guide.
6) Defragment the "Places" database
Firefox 3.x saves information regarding bookmarks, history and other tools in a database called 'Places'. Over time, this database becomes fragmented and slows down browser loading.
Today it is no longer valid.
7) Other manual settings are found in points 9 and 10 of the article on how to optimize Firefox by changing the configuration parameters .
READ ALSO: Things to do if Firefox goes slower than other browsers .
