Does Firefox ever get stupid slow on you?

[Raydog]

What is "Aqua FF or whatever"?

[mrbigstuff]

startup time is painfully slow. opera seems to be the quickest browser i have used. safari is a close second. firefox is last.

[Raydog]

[quote mrbigstuff]startup time is painfully slow. opera seems to be the quickest browser i have used. safari is a close second. firefox is last.
Try this "Optimized build".

http://www.beatnikpad.com/archives/2007/...refox-2002

I use an earlier 2.0.0.2 build (probably on there somewhere), loads much faster than the official builds + a little more Mac like.

[MacMagus]

Firefox 2.0 is slower than earlier versions, it does take an extra few seconds to launch and opening a new window can inexplicably take a couple of seconds, but it's not all that slow once it's running and with tabbed browsing going.

Unless you've got a really slow Mac or have several dozen tabs open you've probably got an extension or cache problem.

On my 1.6GHz G4 under 10.4, I'm seriously taxing my cpu, including a couple of renders and a transcode operation. My CPU meter is pegged at the top. My copy of Firefox has many add-ons/extensions and I've got 3 rows of tabs and it only just started to slow down when I hit the second row of tabs... My About window took about a second to open under these conditions.

Try this: Quit Firefox, go to your ~/Application Support/Firefox folder and remove your user profile folder. Just drag it to your desktop.

See if Firefox is faster the next time you launch it. If it's faster then you've got a problem with an add-on. Quit Firefox again, replace the new profile folder that it created with your old profile folder, launch Firefox again and then select Add-ons from the Tools menu and disable everything. Quit and launch Firefox yet again and it should be quite speedy.

[Raydog]

Good advice MM.

Alternitivily you could create a new profile (from the Kbase):

Mac OS X

Close the application completely and make sure that it is not running in the background. Assuming the program is installed in the "Applications" folder, launch the Terminal (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal) and enter:

* (Firefox) /Applications/firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -profilemanager
* (Mozilla Suite) /Applications/Mozilla.app/Contents/MacOS/mozilla -profilemanager
* (Thunderbird) /Applications/Thunderbird.app/Contents/MacOS/thunderbird -profilemanager

If the above command doesn't work, try again, but include -bin as shown in this example for Thunderbird:

* /Applications/Thunderbird.app/Contents/MacOS/thunderbird-bin -profilemanager

[edit]

[Bimwad]

If you don't make much use of Fx's extensibility, you're much better off using Camino if you want a Gecko-based browser. Ugly widgets I can live with, but missing Mac UI touches like up/down arrow support in input boxes betray Fx's origins and drive me crazy.

Camino doesn't take forever to load, looks and acts like a real Mac application, and is very stable.

It's got a few rough edges here and there, and the pace of development is a bit slower because it's done by dedicated volunteers instead of a paid staff, but the forthcoming 1.1 (nee 1.5) release fills in a lot of blanks in 1.0.

[MacMagus]

> missing Mac UI touches like up/down arrow support in input boxes betray Fx's origins and drive me crazy.

It used to annoy the heck out of me, too and for awhile I simply altered every install of Firefox to work the way that it's supposed to, but eventually I gave up and learned to do it the Firefox way: use + and + to navigate to the beginning and end of a text field.

BTW: I've seen platform-harmonizing text field navigation on the to-do list for Firefox 3 so there's some hope that the situation will improve.