If you’re anything like me, then you get annoyed at how slow Firefox can be. And it’s not only when you try to open Firefox for the first time, it seems like Firefox gets slower the more webpages you visit the more the cache fills up with history.
I’ve written before about how I tested the speed of the Firefox compared to Google’s Chrome browser. I basically clicked to open both browsers at the same time – actually I clicked Firefox first, then Chrome – and I was able to open and close Chrome about 5 times before my Firefox browser full opened for the first time.
Anyway, enough of my ranting. Today I got frustrated enough to dig in a little deeper into Firefox to see what I can do to speed it up and to decrease the “resource hog’ness” of Firefox on my computer (I’m running Windows XP by the way).
Here’s what I did to speed up Firefox and so far it’s been working like a charm. Firefox is now opening faster and getting bogged down a lot less. It’s still nothing compared to Chrome, but hey… I’ll take what I can get with Firefox.
What I’m going to show you to speed up your Firefox browser is basically how to uninstall unnecessary Firefox Addons.
Firefox Addons are plugins, basically, that are always running behind the scenes when your Firefox browser is loaded. There could be exceptions to this, but generally speaking, that’s what’s going on.
So uninstalling some of these Firefox Addons can dramatically decrease the resources your Firefox browser needs to operate, and in turn, increase the speed and efficiency of the browser.
How to remove unwanted Firefox addons
1) Of course, you need to first open Firefox
2) Click on “tools > Addons”
3) Go through list and uninstall “Addons”
Once you’ve clicked on “tools > Add-ons”, a new window will pop up that will show you a list of all the Addons you’ve installed in your Firefox browser. And like I said already, the majority of these Addons are going to start running, and continue running behind the scenes, from the moment to start up Firefox.
Here’s the popup screen you should get once you click “tools > Add-ons”:
Now that you’ve got the list of Add-ons that are installed in your Firefox browser, it’s time to go through and uninstall those that you don’t use, don’t want, or otherwise have no idea why they’re there.
As you scroll through your list of Firefox Add-ons, you’ll notice two buttons on the right hand side of each Add-on. These buttons should be “Disable” and “Uninstall”. What I’ve done to speed up my Firefox browser is actually uninstall the unnecessary Add-ons.
Just click on the “uninstall” button next to the appropriate Add-on.
Go through the entire list first, and then when you are done clicking “Uninstall” on all of the Add-ons you don’t want or need, then go ahead and close down Firefox and restart.
The restarting of Firefox is what officially removes the Add-ons you’ve uninstalled.
The reason you don’t see the “Disable” or “Uninstall” buttons to the right of my image above and because I’ve already gone through and disabled all of my unnecessary Add-ons.
Which is how I know that the process I just described does in fact speed up Firefox.
Now I’m not a Firefox enthusiasts, nor a programmer, but I can say with certainty that the process of uninstalling unnecessary Add-ons will in fact speed up your Firefox browser.
It’s done wonders for me and my Firefox experience.
Let me know how it goes!