Early work on Firefox's new Javascript engine nets big speed gains

Well, another suggestion.(scroll down a bit)

 

You may need extensions (I personally don't) but there's a fine line between enough and too much. Some people like ultimate personalization, others (like me) like light, secure, private software. There's enough room for all of us but the "personalization" crowd seems to be awful loud.

 

twl845, just out of interest, you use ThreatFire? I found it caused some slow-downs with cold starts, but even with it removed, I've seen FF take forever on slower systems with no AV, while chrome and opera load instantly.

No harm in having a 'beef' with a product, and talking about it, as we all have different situations. But my beef with firefox was when you'd shut it down, it wouldn't close correctly, and later when you'd try to open the browser again, it'd say, another version is already running. I'd look in the task manager, and think, 'damn you, got me again!'.

Chrome and opera, and IE, never had the same problem. Sadeghi85, I tried every portable version of firefox I could find, and they had the same problem. Only when I installed 'flock', based off FF, did it open like Chrome, Opera and IE. Once you remove a few toolbars, flock is a decent browser.

 

Yep, FF for the last few releases has had a terrible habit of not closing properly.

 

i really cant see hopw u guys get such long cold start times, with 17 extensions and a theme that i use as well as 6 tabs that open with firefox automatically it takes a total of only 8 seconds to start... (thats also with keyscrambler starting up with firefox as well)

 

It either completely depends on an individual system or FF is just freaking weird. I'll have to time it again to be sure, but I believe my cold start time is around 4-5 seconds (Core i3 530 processor 6Gb DDR3 ram and 7200rpm 1Tb drive on Win 7). I'm smack in the middle of doing some work but I'll post back an accurate time.

I still have high memory issues and such. Granted it isn't a huge issue now as it was on my 1Gb ram XP box, but it still uses much more than it should be. And, it still has that habit of not closing right and crashing.

Edit: 4 second cold start time exactly. This is running it through Sandboxie also.

 

well my hardware is mostly about 3 years old, so its nothing brand new, but people here must be running on Pentium III still...

 

My XP machine was built in 2004. On there, iirc, cold start times did indeed approach the 10 second mark. So, I don't know. One of those unsolved mysteries in life, I suppose

 

Did you try that one on that link?

This is very weird we should figure it out. btw my IE opens in 6 seconds, it's a bit slow.

 

I haven't tried the portableappz one, but I do visit that site. I tried the one from portableapps, and the one x-firefox mentioned here. A couple of others I found as well.

Flock has about a two-second cold start. Only add-on is WOT.

For those interested in trying it out, see screenshot. Solid browser.

 

Could you try that one then? The difference between these versions is the preconfigured settings.

 

Tried it and it loads quick as. About a second or two.

That's how FF should be. I'll keep this version and not install a single add-on.

 

Good, very good

Just some notes, check out about:config look for bold entries, particularly these:

app.update.auto
browser.cache.disk.enable
browser.safebrowsing.enabled
browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled
enter browser.sessionstore.enabled

Those are disabled by default, you may want to enable some of them.


And change these to a lower value like 7

browser.history_expire_days
browser.history_expire_days.mirror
browser.history_expire_days_min

 

I do wish Opera and firefox would add tab separation. its annoying that the whole browser crashes because of one website. no matter how well coded a program is it can still crash so tab separation should be included IMO.

I find opera just as fast as chrome and has alot more features. one of the reasons chrome was so fast at start because it has basically no features.
Alot of people have tryed chrome because its made by google and advertised on google and youtube.com which alot of people use daily.

It does seem stupid that most people like choice on everything but 95percent of people use IE as browser and haven't even tried anything else.
thats why i think the browser ballot will be useful. it may make people think and use another browser.

 

After reading comments here, general curiosity lead me to test the cold-start time of Firefox on my system. First, I did a fresh system reboot. After reboot I launched Firefox and measured the start time on my stopwatch. It took 7.25 seconds to load!

Now, I last defragmented my system drive 17 days ago, so I am assuming after a defrag run, the Firefox's start time will come down even further.

I am only running 5 extensions and one theme. I am running Firefox 3.6. My system is Core2 Duo 2.2 GHz, 3 GB RAM, Vista 32-bit.

I just can't understand why it would take 17+ seconds for Firefox to load for some. If it had taken this long for Firefox to load on my system, I would have dumped it long ago.

 

firefox v4 is expected to have tab isolation.

 

Saraceno - No I don't.

 

Just for info ..

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2010/02/direct2d_landed_in_f.html

 

Cold start, no extensions, portable firefox took 5.9373 seconds. (Warm 0.9686 s)
XP SP2 32-bit; Intel Celeron D 2,53GHz; DDR 512MB; cheap hard disk, cheap motherboard, cheap ...
I don't use security apps, only PowerPro, HotkeyP and Proxomitron loaded in memory.

 

I would posit that Chrome is the most secure browser out of those you mentioned.

 

An earlier post of mine went into why I gave it a thumbs down on security, Google being that reason. Though tests have shown that Chrome is pretty behind others in security. I'm going through a no love, all hate relationship with Google at the moment On the subject of other browsers having separate tab processes, it will come in time.

 

Exactly the same with me, about 2-3 seconds cold start with 32 addons and a theme. But memory does average out to 300-500mb, and sometimes to the north side of 1GB after extended heavy use. Also about every second shutdown requires a trip to task manager to forcibly kill it.

But considering the work it does, and the money i paid for it those problems are an acceptable trade-off.

 

I don't mind the startup times. FF is the only browser I use because of the addons. To me an ideal webbrowser would use WebKit (not Gecko), have tab isolation, full compatibility with XUL addons, and a completely rewritten codebase (most of Firefox's problems such as mem usage, crashing etc are due to its legacy code). It would have a pluggable JS engine and UI modules, so you could make it as light as you wanted.

 

I followed your suggestion and now FF cold starts in 17 seconds.

 

You mean you tried FF portable??