Loading speed of Firefox

[Loose rivets]

I only have an Athlon duo 5400 with 3.2 gigs usable cos I'm on 32bit W7.

FF seems to be taking a much longer time to load these days than it did on this machine - about 5 or 6 seconds. Surprising how irritating this is when one is at the computer as much as I am.

What should I expect? I have a new-ish SSD drive devoted to the OS.

FF 36.0.4 is called from C-drive

A ballpark figure would help, por favor.

[mixture]

Does Firefox do the same when you load it in safe mode ? How about when you load it under a new user profile ?

If no to either or both of those questions, then its not a Firefox problem.

[PowerDragTrim]

I found the same as you some time ago, Loose rivets.

I solved it by initially using a blank page as home page but eventually switched to Pale Moon browser, which is FF based, but seemed faster to me.

Worth a try? The Pale Moon Project homepage (http://www.palemoon.org/)

[Loose rivets]

I tried starting in Safe mode, but that showed surprisingly little difference. Perhaps a second. I killed Kasperksy, and much the same, though I wondered how Kasper was haunting its way back as even getting into the start menus via msconfig, it seemed to re-tick itself while I wasn't looking.

My i7 W7 64bit with 6 gigs is a little faster. A second, perhaps.

I wondered about Google being my FF front end. I don't want anything but that when I start FF, but I'm aware Google is probably trying to seek my great-grandparents details while it loads the front page. I suddenly realised that I know of no way to have a totally blank lower screen when firing up FireFox.:confused:

Oh, by the way, I had one heck of a job getting into Safe Mode. F8 didn't work whenever I pressed it. Not in ten goes. msconfig route seemed the only way.

Alternatives to 'pure' FF? I'm listening, but in all other respects, I'm making good use of that browser. My Bookmarks Toolbar is my window to the world, with for example, PPRuNe's different sub-forums all being listed for direct access under one button.

Like a lot of old fogies, I hate change, but can't tolerate the six second delay any longer.

[mixture]

I suddenly realised that I know of no way to have a totally blank lower screen when firing up FireFox.

Yes there is, just set your homepage to "about:blank" (without quote marks).

As for average load time, Firefox should take 1-2 seconds max to open.

[Loose rivets]

Thanks, that worked, inasmuch as I got my blank screen, but it made no difference to the time.

One thing, cutting all the non-MS stuff on boot, Kaspersky simply re-ticks its own box as the Apply button is pressed. Also, Pausing it, does blank out the K on the bottom bar (right of the task bar) but I have a gut feeling it's itching to get back to work and thus doing something. Determined little :mad:

For a few moments it started loading in about 3 seconds. But then back to the full six when no doubt, something else had reinstated itself. Three would be fine - so a ray of hope.

I'll look at Add-ons later today.

Must do some chores, but back later. Thanks again, mixture.

[mixture]

Kaspersky simply re-ticks its own box as the Apply button is pressed

Interesting...must be some sort of counter-measure they've got going to fight against those viruses that try to disable anti-virus.

I'm guessing there must be a preference setting somewhere in the Kaspersky software that would enable you to disable the behaviour without having to resort to uninstalling. If I get a chance later I'll do a bit of digging around.

[Loose rivets]

I hope there is, just tried to disable Kasper Add-ons and it reset all five. Good point about it protecting itself, but I have a real problem making simple transactions like paying my Barclay Visa. When, and that's difficult, I get rid of their green screen, I find the Barclay added security thing under that. :ugh:

Back to work for a while.

[Booglebox]

FF is a bit of a dog. On my fairly modern machine it takes about 4 seconds.

[gemma10]

I`ve been suffering with this for years, and you are moaning about 4-6 seconds. Have just turned my laptop on W7 64 bit, it has taken 22 seconds for the page to load and allow me to use bookmarks.I remember a post about this not long ago, and tried everything as recommended, all to no avail. I`m used to it now. FF is just a very large file.:confused:

[cattletruck]

Used to run the latest FF on my old ASUS netbook with only 512Mb memory, it was a memory hog easily chewing 200Mb on return back to a blank page and not releasing that memory. Besides startup time, it wasn't all that bad, maybe because the netbook used SSD.

I researched the FF problem once and if I remember right the issue was to do with the flavour of some embedded technology (Javascript interpreter I think) that was architected to run fast but with the penalty of being a memory hog.

Like everything software wise FF has become bloatware - the curse of browser technology is that they have be able to do the latest and greatest while maintaining some backwards compatability.

[Loose rivets]

Only half a gig. I was worried my 3.something usable was being a problem.

Speed because of a big file? mixture seems to have overcome that, though I suspect a powerful bit of kit, (and anyway, probably fine-tunes everything in his sleep. ;) )

I went to time Word 10. It's so fast that it's difficult, but from fresh boot, it's about 1.2 seconds (it's on an SSD drive) and when it's put part of itself in memory, it's well sub one second.

That's another thing. Whatever slows FF down doesn't get better from having been run. Maybe that's a good thing . . . clearing out of memory when closed? I assume the above mentioned memory-hogging was just going back to it's main screen . . . question mark.

With my 32bit duo, I'm clearly not operating efficiently is some way or another. Lately, I've taken to using extra tabs rather than opening new browsers and on several occasions it looks like the graphics section jams up the system. When I go to close the (even one single) extra tab it locks up and leaves some detritus near the tab. I even had the headbanging emoticon and one other showing on an otherwise unrelated screen. Pprune was on tab 1 of course. It can be quite a lockup, occasionally needing Taskmanager End Process to escape.

Back to real work for a while.

[le Pingouin]

MS Office components are generally pre-loaded during the start-up process so start quickly whereas FF usually isn't.

[Loose rivets]

Ah, I wondered about that. I recall the days of Word taking half an eternity. So, not much of a comparison. One will try this and that, though other issues are rather pressing at the moment.

[mixture]

Speed because of a big file?

Speed because of a big file ?

Absolute and utter codswallop if you're talking about executables (i.e software).

Only makes sense if you're dealing with stuff that tests how well the developers have programmed memory buffer usage in their software (e.g. dealing with large images in editing software).

mixture seems to have overcome that, though I suspect a powerful bit of kit, (and anyway, probably fine-tunes everything in his sleep. )

The only time I've had issues with Firefox is if I have a multitude of windows and tabs open. Nobody should have a slow-loading Firefox unless they've got a particularly sluggish machine.

And for the record, I don't fine-tune desktop machines .... nobody should, its about as useful as waving a dead chicken over your computer. All you need to remember are the holy trinity :

(a) A reasonably decent processor (i.e. no Celeron-type nonsense)
(b) As much RAM as you can afford (well, within reason... no need to go up to 24GB unless you're doing image manipulation or such like !)
(c) If you're only running a 5400rpm disk drive, swap for 7200 (or a decent SSD if you can afford it).

In other words, speaking from many years of experience, the secret with desktops/laptops is in the hardware .... that will be the downfall of 99.9999% of users.

(Well, ok, for the sake of completeness, for Windows users there might be a (d), consisting of registry bloat and fragmentation ... but if your Windows machine is less than a couple of years old and already feeling sluggish then my money would be on the hardware being the root cause).

[Heathrow Harry]

Mrs Harry says the problem is probably with tabs that have a lot of graphic updates to things - such as Pprune adverts

FF is opening lots of tabs & having to stream and select video input from them - it just slows it down

If your saved tabs are few and simple it should be very quick......

[Loose rivets]

My opening screen is one tab with Google in the middle. Just their theme thingy for the day. Machine? Yep, getting a bit long in the tooth, but my Sony laptop is an i7 with six gig and is only a tad faster as mentioned above.

Given mixture's suggested speed of loading, I'm going to have another look when I get a moment. Computer time has been largely taken up with the 9525 disaster. Now another total hull loss today.

[cattletruck]

I found with FF on my 512Mb ASUS Netbook I regularly had to blow away the cache, sometimes I even had to blow away those sqlite files too as they seemed to bloat up to 60Mb with zero cache.

There was also this FF option of looking for search engine updates which needed disabling. Plus disabling the check to see if FF was the default browser, disabling checking for FF updates, disabling FF cloud (or whatever they call it, sync I think) all of which added to the overall FF start up time.

[ShyTorque]

Look on the bright side.... 5 days into a computer discussion and no mention of the "A" word! ;)

[Bushfiva]

Look on the bright side.... 5 days into a computer discussion and no mention of the "A" word! ;)



Windows XP doesn't have an "A" in it anywhere. Duh.

[Ancient Observer]

Any religious folk out there offended by waving dead chickens over computers?

[Keef]

Nope, but it's a bit messy.

I don't know how long Firefox takes to load because it's always running and I don't turn the PC off unless there's a specific need to do so.

[ShyTorque]

Windows XP doesn't have an "A" in it anywhere. Duh.But we all knew that.....

BTW, I just timed my Firefox. It opens in less than 2 seconds, with BT as the homepage.

[mixture]

Any religious folk out there offended by waving dead chickens over computers?

Seriously ? :ugh:

For the absolute avoidance of doubt my post was not written with any religious undertone !

I've no idea what religion waves dead chickens, and I don't want to either, as far as I was concerned "waving a dead chicken" is just one of those "sayings".

This is the "computers & internet" section of an Aviation forum. You can hardly go looking for Religious context in a more inappropriate place !

[Keef]

Like so many of "those sayings", mixture, that's where it comes from.
It's not from my lot - we're more into fish than poultry, and anyway - as you say - neither is relevant for computing.

I spend some of my time fixing computers for the good folk of the villages, and often their problem is caused by browser hijackers and PUPs - as provided "free of charge" by certain well known organisations (they require you to untick the box if you don't want the proffered goodie). One delightful octogenarian lady had so many search toolbars that she didn't have much browser screen left to work in.

[Ancient Observer]

Mixture,

It was only a JB sort of comment. I rather liked the image you created.

[mixture]

Ancient Observer,

Ah ok. Thanks for clarifying.

Its a great shame his writings don't cover Windows, but for those using Linux, Solaris, BSD or OS X, the various performance troubleshooting methodology guides from Brendan Gregg will easily provide a more authoritative process than needing to resort to dead foodstuffs. Lots of great stuff on his website. :cool:

[Loose rivets]

Got the i7 Vaio out after a long pause and on starting, it offered me an Nvidia driver update. Since one of the reasons I don't use this laptop is the rather poor colours I thought I'd give it a go. It seemed quite a lot better after the update.

Then I noticed it was going into FF in less than 3 seconds. (prior to that it was only a second faster than the old duo PC at c 6 seconds. Five at best.

Goody, thinks I. But my glee was short lived. Soon it was back to about 5 seconds. In that gap I had changed bookmark files and KeePass data. That's about it. (Bookmarks were substantially less than before.)

It was nice while it lasted.