How to speed up Firefox 3 dramatically.

English Applications
1

I’ve been suffering with a very slow Firefox 3.0.1 lately, and just figured
out how to cure this.

Thought the rest of you might want to try it and see if it helps your
experiences with FF3.

There are several bug reports concerning heavy drive thrashing and slow
operation. These all boil down to the way FF3 is handling some data.

To help people identify Phishing sites, forgeries (phorgeries?) and general
ickiness, FF3 contacts Google.com for EVERY http request. EVERY REQUEST.

And then it saves the results into ‘urlclassifier3.sqlite’ in your profile.

This file grew to more than 50MB, at which point I read that you could
‘vacuum’ it using ‘sqlite3’ to drop the unused database entries. I did this,
it shrank to 33MB, a savings of 17MB… but the thrashing continued.

If you will disable the Google checks, then exit FF3 and delete the
‘urlclassifier3.sqlite’ file from your profile, your FF3 experience will be
much nicer, albeit at the expense of some assistance in Phish Site Phinding.

Turn off these two options: (under preferences)

Security -> “Tell me if the site I’m visiting is a suspected Attack site”
Security -> “Tell me if the site I’m visiting is a suspected forgery”

Close the preferences window, exit Firefox, then delete the
‘urlclassifier3.sqlite’ file:

rm .mozilla/firefox/*/urlclassifier3.sqlite

The file WILL be recreated upon the next start of Firefox3, but it’s only
32KB in size, and isn’t expected to grow since the two “Tell me” options are
off.

It’s made a world of difference in the browsing experience for me.

Hopefully this helps others.

Loni

–
L R Nix
lornix@lornix.com

2

Yes! Great! You put back the drama to dramatically. The Fox is running again :slight_smile:

3

L R Nix wrote:
> Hopefully this helps others.

imHo this how-to should be posted to o.o.h.howto.submissions

–
DenverD (Linux Counter 282315) via NNTP, Thunderbird 2.0.0.14, KDE
3.5.7, SUSE Linux 10.3, 2.6.22.18-0.2-default #1 SMP i686 athlon

4

How dangerous are phishing attacks really? I mean, assuming I don’t click on any links to paypal sent to my by my new rich friends in nigeria, isn’t the danger pretty low?

5

If you know what you’re doing, and is able to recognize a phishing scam if one appears on your doorstep, then do it.

For people new to the 'Net (and those who are not so sure what a phishing scam is) it is recommended to keep the default settings enabled.

YMMV. Be careful, it’s a wild, wild web out there…

Regards

Libs

6

wow, that’s a great help!
also saved 56mb of space!!!

STICKY"!!!111

7

On Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:16:01 GMT
badger fruit <badger_fruit@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:

> wow, that’s a great help!
> also saved 56mb of space!!!
>
> STICKY"!!!111

{Smile} If you’re worried about 56Meg of space in THIS day and age… OMG!

That works out to just about 0.00219% of my current total storage space.
Just over two one-thousandths of 1 percent of storage.

Even if you had a nice 250GB drive, it’s 0.0219%, that’s just over 2
one-hundredths of 1 percent. Rather minuscule.

Granted, I STARTED out on a 4K machine. Not Gig. Not Meg. KILO.

Want me to start in on the ‘uphill both ways’, ‘hole in my shoe’, ‘5 miles to
school’ stories now?

I learned how to program when memory was Thou$ands of dollars per K… and
have tried to apply that experience to everything I write now. Generally
makes programs faster too. {Grin}

Oh well.

–
L R Nix
lornix@lornix.com
No, really… get OFF the lawn!

8

i test firefox nightlies. for example today’s build is:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1a2pre) Gecko/20080821020715 Minefield/3.1a2pre - Build ID: 20080821020715

this seemed to work well for me too.

i have a question regarding this though. does anyone know if this is a natural occurence? if it isn’t expected to happen over time, then perhaps someone should file a bug about it, with a title something along the line of:
Suspected Attack Site/Suspected Forgery checks slows Firefox down.

9

have a question regarding this though. does anyone know if this is a natural occurence? if it isn’t expected to happen over time, then perhaps someone should file a bug about it, with a title something along the line of:
Suspected Attack Site/Suspected Forgery checks slows Firefox down.

Its not a bug as such, just a security feature that some may prefer to disable. (Similar in nature to beagle indexing that can cause annoying resource issues).

10

WOO WOO!!!

100 MB disk space saved and my load times are back down to the 0.25 second mark… Thank you sir!!

11

Yap, worked for me to. I didn’t paid attention to the cache itself, but I had a lag with multiple tabs open. Now this lag is gone.

12

L R Nix schrieb:
> {Smile} If you’re worried about 56Meg of space in THIS day and age… OMG!
>
> That works out to just about 0.00219% of my current total storage space.

Lucky you.

> Even if you had a nice 250GB drive, it’s 0.0219%, that’s just over 2
> one-hundredths of 1 percent. Rather minuscule.

Perhaps Santa will bring me a 250 GB drive for Christmas so I’ll be
able to play with you big guys again. Until then - a saving of 56 MB
would indeed matter to me.

Luckily, I haven’t upgraded to FF3 anyway, for a different reason.
(The absolutely insane number of hoops it asks me to jump through
in order to connect to an SSL site with a certificate signed by
a CA it doesn’t happen to know, in case you’re interested.)
Now I have a second reason to avoid the move.

13

On Fri, 22 Aug 2008 23:19:29 GMT
Tilman Schmidt <t.schmidt@phoenixsoftware.de> wrote:

> Perhaps Santa will bring me a 250 GB drive for Christmas so I’ll be
> able to play with you big guys again. Until then - a saving of 56 MB
> would indeed matter to me.

I do understand, it took me a while to get to this level.

> Luckily, I haven’t upgraded to FF3 anyway, for a different reason.
> (The absolutely insane number of hoops it asks me to jump through
> in order to connect to an SSL site with a certificate signed by
> a CA it doesn’t happen to know, in case you’re interested.)
> Now I have a second reason to avoid the move.

If I remember the sequence correctly, it’s three, maybe four clicks with the
mouse. You really don’t even have to read… which should please many of the
users out there…

Sounds like you’re looking for reasons to grumble about things. {Shrug} No
problem. If you apply this FF3 ‘fix’ immediately upon first use of firefox,
it never even HAS a chance to grow to that size. Fix it, it stays little.

Loni

–
L R Nix
lornix@lornix.com

14

Just curious… has anyone ever seen FF report a phishing site? I was reluctant to turn this off until I realized it has never done anything for me.

15

> Just curious… has anyone ever seen FF report a phishing site?

sure!
next time you get one of those emails from ‘your bank’ (or your
credit card, or or or) saying you need to update your account
info…if it has one of those addresses used to track your email
address to a live person…you know like:

http://www.[soundsLikeSomeBank.com/2687514586834425#7373]

then, change a few numbers and try to get in (without letting them
know that YOUR email address is live…

and, usually VERY soon after arriving Firefox will pop up a
warning…i’ve seen that SEVERAL times…

–
DenverD (Linux Counter 282315) via NNTP, Thunderbird 2.0.0.14, KDE
3.5.7, SUSE Linux 10.3, 2.6.22.18-0.2-default #1 SMP i686 athlon

16

Thanks for the nice tweak lornix, it cleared up 52mb for me :slight_smile:
Another tweak to speed up Firefox is to type about:config in the location bar. Scroll down to the line network.http.pipelining and toggle it to true. Modify network.http.pipelining.maxrequest to 30. This tweak has the advantage of working for all versions of Firefox. Do be careful though, mucking around in this file can roundly and soundly screw up Firefox.

17

s h i t ! it flies now! nice tip.

18

L R Nix wrote:

>
> I’ve been suffering with a very slow Firefox 3.0.1 lately, and just
> figured out how to cure this.
>
> Thought the rest of you might want to try it and see if it helps your
> experiences with FF3.
>
> There are several bug reports concerning heavy drive thrashing and slow
> operation. These all boil down to the way FF3 is handling some data.
>
> To help people identify Phishing sites, forgeries (phorgeries?) and
> general
> ickiness, FF3 contacts Google.com for EVERY http request. EVERY REQUEST.
>
> And then it saves the results into ‘urlclassifier3.sqlite’ in your
> profile.
>
> This file grew to more than 50MB, at which point I read that you could
> ‘vacuum’ it using ‘sqlite3’ to drop the unused database entries. I did
> this, it shrank to 33MB, a savings of 17MB… but the thrashing continued.
>
> If you will disable the Google checks, then exit FF3 and delete the
> ‘urlclassifier3.sqlite’ file from your profile, your FF3 experience will
> be much nicer, albeit at the expense of some assistance in Phish Site
> Phinding.
>
> Turn off these two options: (under preferences)
>
> Security → “Tell me if the site I’m visiting is a suspected Attack site”
> Security → “Tell me if the site I’m visiting is a suspected forgery”
>
> Close the preferences window, exit Firefox, then delete the
> ‘urlclassifier3.sqlite’ file:
>
> rm .mozilla/firefox/*/urlclassifier3.sqlite
>
> The file WILL be recreated upon the next start of Firefox3, but it’s only
> 32KB in size, and isn’t expected to grow since the two “Tell me” options
> are off.
>
> It’s made a world of difference in the browsing experience for me.
>
> Hopefully this helps others.
>
> Loni
>
It works really nice. I would like to refer to this on my blog site with
your permission.

19

Much faster now! Thank You! :slight_smile:

20

Works well even with 3.0.4!