Comments on: Firefox 7: Cheating the Operating System to Start Faster

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 10:01:34 +0000

Firefox is degrading in terms of speed day by day, I am using Chrome now. It is much better

By: tony

tony — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 20:44:14 +0000

so if firefox know of this problem why don’t they include the fix in one of their many security upgrades?
I am getting more and more interested in going to another browser since trying 7

By: tglek

tglek — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 21:24:51 +0000

@AV,

1. FF7 + Vbscript should result in a perf boost. Use about:startup extension to verify. Never accept performance improvements without verifying they apply to you
2. 5400rpm is just an example of slow hw. Heuristic uses a windows api to count number of io operations
3. Prefetch will likely make firefox slower, unless you follow the above instructions on clearing it + restarting computer, then it might be faster

@patlecat, clearing prefetch manually + reboot is the other way

By: patlecat

patlecat — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 17:32:12 +0000

Updating Firefox made it impossible to use this tip, because it restarted Firefox automatically. Very clever

Is there another way?

By: Bruno

Bruno — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 09:12:47 +0000

a little off topic:

What about this: I’ve placed this link into my autostart folder.

“C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” -silent

Firefox is loaded (perhaps with all/many/some dlls, don’t know), and immediately stopped; So the first user-initiated-start of Firefox is os-wise the second one (and perhaps a little faster).

what do you think?

By: AV

AV — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:04:31 +0000

I’m trying to understand:
1.if I use the vbscript from bugzilla I improve the performance, and with the new patch firefox will become even faster.

2.is too slow 5400rpm for the heuristic or you mean something really really slow?

3.if prefetch is working normally, your patch stop working, make faster or make slower?

Sorry but I want to accelerate firefox a little on my netbook…

By: pd

pd — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 09:46:07 +0000

I’m confused. I run Aurora, currently version 8.0a2 (2011-09-21) on Windows XP. Windows Prefetch is enabled on my machine as I asumme it is on most Windows machines, by default.

A free software program for viewing and removing Windows .pf (Prefetch) files, that is easy to use, is available here:

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/win_prefetch_view.html

Using that program I deleted the Firefox*.pf file. Will that enable me to take advantage of the code made available in FF7 Taras?

If not, does the install and reboot before starting trick work for user’s have already had Firefox installed, like me?

By: meatfree

meatfree — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 02:06:34 +0000

maybe it is true that all browsers are getting huge. In fact, this give me the impression that the startup time is not necessary relative to it size, otherwise, it dones’t make sense Chrome load a bigger footprint in less time.

By: tglek

tglek — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 18:35:10 +0000

Tomas, actually chrome binary footprint is bigger than firefox now. They face the exact same problems. Every modern browser is roughly the same size(huge) because the web is complex. We are actually collaborating with Chrome folks on some of these issues that can be fixed at OS/toolchain level.

By: Tomas B

Tomas B — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 17:47:35 +0000

I stop reading your article at the second sentence. That is exactly why firefox is losing its cool. It’s becoming too large for ALL OSes (what other OSes am I not aware of that ff load faster?)

The Mozilla team like to blame everything on everybody else except their ancient code base. I don’t see the IE9 and Chrome having problem with cold boot and I don’t see them complaining about superfetch (it’s a function of windows for a reason). What I see is IE9 and Chrome solved their boot time and Mozilla complains about it.