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How to optimize Firefox for Maximum Performance

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The world’s best browser Firefox is very good with all those plugins and add-ons but the price often comes in the form of slower performance and memory hogging.So in order to make it cool we need to tweak it up a little so that you can get maximum performance out of it. This can be done by using some Extensions which will perform operations which will lighten the load on the browser.

Here are 10 Best ways using add-ons or Plugins to Optimize Firefox for maximum Performance :

 

PDF Download

One of the reasons for Firefox getting slower is the PDF files. When a plug-in like Acrobat Reader is loaded in Firefox, it isn’t unloaded until you quit the browser. This helpful extension will ask whether you want to open a PDF file in Firefox, translate it to HTML (via Google), download it locally, or cancel the link.

You can get it by Clicking Here

 

No Script

JavaScript handling is one of the biggest problems in Firefox. To get over this problem here is a wonderful add called Quick Java on which all Java and JavaScript by default, then lets you add sites to your white list as you surf.

You can get it by Clicking Here

 

Flash Block

Flash content on web sites can be annoying most of the times. Flash movies which will get played as soon as you go to the site will bring down the speed of Firefox. You can stop this with Flash Block. This replaces all Flash movies with play buttons that give you control over when or whether the movie plays. Even if you don’t care about enhancing browser performance, it’s a great tool for saner surfing. However, it doesn’t function with NoScript enabled, and some times it may also lead to crashing of browser.

You can get it by Clicking Here

 

FireTune

FireTune is a software which is widely used to optimize Firefox. This is a collection of settings that can be configured with the browser based on the Internet connection speed and computer configuration. It won’t likely reduce memory usage, but it should speed up your browsing, especially on lower-end systems.

 

You can download it by Clicking Here

 

Control animations with about:config

The administration of Firefox can be done through about:config. You can open the control panel of Firefox by Typing about:config into your Firefox address bar and hitting Enter. One easy configuration change is limiting animated images. Double-click image.animation_mode and change it to none to stop all animated images, or once to let them run through once. You can revert to the default behavior with normal. This will control animations on the web sites.

 

Clean up downloads

If you download a lot through Firefox Downloader one thing you have to remember is to clean up all the completed downloads after you are done with downloading. If you don’t do it Firefox will stall slightly when you start downloading because the download manager can’t handle many operations at a time.Hit Ctrl+J to bring up your recent downloads, and if you’ve got more than 20, clean them out.

 

Back-Forward cache

One more tip which can be done through the  about:config screen.  Firefox has a special “Back-Forward cache” for recently visited pages that works differently than the regular browser cache. The default setting for browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers, “-1,” will save up to 8 pages if you have more than 512MB RAM on your PC. Reduce the number to zero for maximum memory savings.

 

Zap and other bookmarklets

Zap is one type of bookmarklet which is used to disable annoying scripts, plug-ins, and event handlers to improve performance. Bookmarklets are small JavaScript programs that can be saved as bookmarks. Simply drag the Zap link into your Bookmarks Toolbar and hit it whenever you want to kill annoyances on Web pages.
(Note that the “Zap” links above don’t take you anywhere; they simply remove background images, scripts, etc.)

 

Disable/uninstall extensions

We will install many add-ons and extensions we come across to give them a try. Add-ons like Greasemonkey are extremely cool to play around with for some time. But after that we don’t actually use them. If you want faster performance all you have to do is Disable or Uninstall Unused Extensions and Add-ons.

 

Start in Safe Mode

Mozilla has a safe mode for all its applications like Firefox and Thunderbird. The safe mode will load the application without themes or extensions. If you’ve lost the included shortcut, you can start in Safe Mode by clicking the Windows Start button, then selecting Run, and entering “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” -safe-mode. If you notice a dramatic improvement, it’s likely an extension or theme that’s slowing you down. Find the add-on which is slowing your Firefox by disabling one by one.

Apart from these, there are many extensions which will speed up Firefox in many ways. If you know any good add-ons which will upgrade the Firefox performance please share them here.

Source: Download.com

 

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