How to Speed Up Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is currently one of the top, fastest Internet browsers available, but can slow down over time due to browser history, problems with add-ons, and other various factors. However, you can speed up the performance of Firefox by refreshing browser settings, deleting history, minimizing memory usage, and more.

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10 Ways to Speed up your Mozilla Firefox

1. Enable private browsing. Private browsing will allow you to browse the Internet without allowing Firefox to remember or keep track of your browsing history, which can use up memory and slow down Firefox.

• Click on “Firefox” and select “Preferences.”
• Click on the “Privacy” tab and select “Never remember history” from the History dropdown menu. 

2. Clear all current history. Firefox may run slow as a result of having to keep track of your browsing history.

• Click on “Firefox” and select “Preferences.”
• Click on the “Privacy” tab and click on “Clear all current history.”

3. Enable HTTP cache. Enabling the HTTP cache can help reduce user interface glitches and the occurrence of browser crashes.

• Open a new tab in Firefox and type “about:config” into the address bar.
• Type “browser.cache.use” into the search bar.
• Double-click on “0” in the value column next to “browser.cache.use_new_backend.”
• Change the value to “1,” then close the “about:config” tab and continue browsing.

4. Refresh the Firefox browser. Refreshing Firefox will delete extensions and themes, website permissions, added search engines, security settings, toolbar customizations, and more.

• Open a new tab in Firefox and type “about:support” into the address bar.
• Click on “Refresh Firefox.”

5. Minimize memory usage. This can help immediately free up memory being used by one or more open Firefox tabs.

• Open a new tab in Firefox and type “about:memory” into the address bar.
• Click on “Minimize memory usage” under “Free memory.”

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6. Clear the cache. By default, Firefox caches the contents of the sites you visit to improve loading time, which can slow down browser performance when the cache becomes too large.

• Click on “Firefox” and select “Preferences.”
• Click on the “Advanced” tab, then click on the “Network” tab.
• Click on “Clear Now” next to Cached Web Content.
• Click on “Clear Now” next to Offline Web Content and User Data.

7. Enable pipelining. Pipelining allows your browser to send multiple requests to a server before any responses are received, which can help reduce page download times.

• Open a new tab in Firefox and type “about:config” into the address bar.
• Double-click on “network.http.pipelining” and set the value to “True.”
• Double-click on “network.http.proxy.pipelining” and set the value to “True.”
• Double-click on “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” and set the value to “8.”

8. Block Flash objects. Flash animations commonly exist in one or more places on various sites in the form of advertisements and animations, and can slow down browsing.

• Click on “Tools” in Firefox and select “Add-ons.”
• Type “Flashblock” into the search bar of the Add-ons tab.
• Select the option to install the Flashblock add-on to Firefox. The add-on will replace Flash objects with a button you can click on to view the Flash content, instead of automatically playing Flash content upon visiting the site.

9. Resolve problems with unresponsive script. Certain websites and extensions may have scripts that run too long and either stop or slow down Firefox.

• Open a new tab in Firefox and type “about:config” into the address bar.
• Type “dom.max_script_run_time” into the search bar.
• Double-click on the entry, and type “20” into the integer value prompt that displays on-screen.
• Click on “OK.”

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10. Limit the use of RAM. This can help reduce the amount of RAM being used by Firefox at any given time if the browser is using up too much memory^.

• Open a new tab in Firefox and type “about:config” into the address bar.
• Type “browser.cache” into the search bar, and click on “browser.cache.disk.capacity.”
• Change the value from 50000 to 15000 if you have between 512 MB and 1 GB of RAM, or to another value depending on your available memory.