Need Firefox help!

[TheMightyFavog]

OK, I decided to dump IE when I got here in favor of Firefox. The probl;em is now it takes fucking forever for pages to load in Firefox, while on Exploder, it takes no time at all! :mad: :mad: :mad: I've just complained to the people in charge of the internet here in the dorms, and the campus IT staff. They'll probably tell me to just dump Forefox. No. Fucking. Way. I like my tabbed browsing, popup control, and better security, thank you very much.

Can anyone here help me?

[smiley_glad_hands]

1. yeah there is a little lag

but I couldn't say why

[Gnscih]

2. Foxfire

Try Opera. Free. Really fast. I use a PC and a Mac, and I use Opera on both.

[gospelized]

3. !

congrats on seeing the light! firefox is wonderful.

but i can't really help you with pages loading slow. i've never had that problem. switching from IE to firefox was like a religious experience to me.

[realisticphish]

5. same here

i am waiting with baited breath til i can get back up to school and my T1 line to get 0.9


:hippie: The Incorrigible Democrat

[dumpster_baby]

4. I had to dump firefox and go to Netscape

I do not use IE anymore, but Netscape is what Firefox is built on, so it works basically the same.

I had to dump FF because I had much the same problem as you. When i was downloading 4 or more tabbed pages simultaneously, the downloading process would all slow way down. I have XP home version.

Check out Netscape.

The new version 1.0 of FF is due this month. Hopefully that bug will be gone, and then I will go back to FF.

[RodneyCK2]

6. I use Firefox and love it! I actually did a comparison against IE...

and found Firefox to load pages way faster than IE. My friends were amazed.

I would assume something else is slowing Firefox down. Usually, it is an Anti-virus program, Norton is a big hindrance to browser speed. Do you have any anti-spy software running in the background? Also, try un-installing Firefox completely and re-installing.

Hope that helps..

[alexwcovington]

7. Opera works better -- for now anyway.

Opera has its issues, but it's better than Firefox. I'd give Firefox another year before it's worth the effort to switch. If you want something that works right now, I suggest Opera.

http://www.opera.com/download/

[hobbit709]

8. firefox

What is your system configuration? I found that Mozilla/Firefox is infinitely faster than Internet Exploder. The Mozilla engine is what powers Netscape. Depending on what OS version, memory, cpu speed and what is running in background you should be able to speed it up. I do this kind of stuff for a living and never had it slow any system down, always the opposite.

[0rganism]

9. You must think in Russian!

[RoyGBiv]

10. I'll try...

Just up front, one thing to remember with FireFox is that it's currently in the developmental stages, i.e. not even the 1.0 version. It's rather amazing to me it works as beautifully as it does at this point, but anyway. It can take some tweaking to get things to work the way you want them to on specific systems, and some of this advice is definitely system dependent. But, overall, there is absolutely no reason why FireFox should not do things generally faster than IE.

A couple questions. I'll offer suggestions before waiting for the answers since you may not be reading at the moment, but I can try to go into more detail based on your answers if need be.

1) Do you know what the user.js file is, and have you created one? If you don't have one, make one. It's just a text file that should be placed in your profile directory. If you are using at least version .9, assuming a standard, personal Windoze environment setup with your application files on drive C:, you will place this in :

C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR USER NAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

You will have another directory called something like default.xxx (the extension is randomly generated) in the Profiles directory. Open that and create user.js there. There will be a number of other files and directories there also. This is where FireFox keeps all its data specific to you.

Just open up Notepad and save a plain text file named user.js

BTW, by default, the "application data" file is hidden by Windoze. You'll have to make sure the "show hidden files folders" setting under the Tools/Folder Options/View is checked in order to see that directory.

Now, add these lines to the file:

user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.pipelining.firstrequest", true);
user_pref("network.http.pipelining.maxrequests", 8);
user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 0);
user_pref("content.notify.backoffcount", 5);
user_pref("plugin.expose_full_path", true);
user_pref("ui.submenuDelay", 0);

2) The following is based on a combination of your connection speed and system configuration, i.e. memory and speed. All this is relative. "Fast" connection basically means at least DSL. "Fast" computer speed basically means anything running over 1.2GHZ with better than recommended memory for running Windoze XP (256MB). This could also be affected by your drive speed, even your graphics card, but it would be insane to try to tweak it with all these factors in mind. Processor and memory are the most important for this.

IF you have a fast connection and a fast computer, add these lines:


user_pref("content.interrupt.parsing", true);
user_pref("content.max.tokenizing.time", 2250000);
user_pref("content.notify.interval", 750000);
user_pref("content.notify.ontimer", true);
user_pref("content.switch.threshold", 750000);
user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 0);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections", 48);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections-per-server", 16);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy", 16);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server", 8);
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.capacity", 65536);


If you have some other setup, I'll just end by suggesting you go to the following site, where I originally got most of this:

http://www.tweakfactor.com/articles/tweaks/firefoxtweak/4.html

If you read through the page, you'll note some other things, including a nice little tweak for the user.js file that prevents those media windows that open to display pics, vids, sound browsers, etc. from cutting out the tabs and menu bars.

Anyway, after you've added whatever you're going to add to the user.js file, save it, close it, and restart FireFox. If this doesn't speed things up, there is some other problem than just the program itself.

OnEdit: BTW, one of the things that may make it seem as though FF is running slower than IE is that IE displays images as they are loading. The default for FF is not to display images until after they are loaded. In pages with large images this can make the entire page seem to be loading slowly, especially on slower connections. You can alter this via the user.js file as well. Follow the link leading backwards on the page listed above for the code to add.