Slooooow Firefox on the Mac
Lately, I had been having trouble running Firefox properly on my Mac G5. For static sites, it wasn't too bad, but for multimedia sites like youtube, it was hell! Whereas it used to be smooth all of a sudden, it'd start to slow down like crazy. Tried rebooting my Mac, turning it off then turning it on again, to no change. I even started to wonder if there was anything wrong with my 1GB memory strip (my Mac uses a combo of 1GB + 512 MB strips, for a total of 1.5 GB of RAM). According to the Mac hardware list, both were running ok, so that wasn't the issue. And my G5 is a 2.0 GHz model, so it's definitely not slow.
Then, I thought that maybe I just didn't free enough space on the computer's HDD for the cache, so I proceeded to move a few GBs of videos to the external hard drive. Still no difference. It couldn't be my Internet connection, since I have DSL and the Airport connection bars are to the max. Besides, there didn't seem to be as many issues with Safari, so it looked like it was Firefox-specific.
And indeed, with some research, turns out that something in Firefox 3 slows down the software considerably, but what? After some help from Google, I found a website that said exactly what to change in Firefox's advanced configs (accessible via about:config in the URL bar). After rebooting Firefox, indeed all slowdown issues were gone! Yay, a winner is me!
So, if you're having similar problems with Firefox 3 (it could apply to Windows too) -- and apparently with IE too --, check out the following site. :)
http://www.aboutonlinetips.com/optimize-firefox-and-ie-browsing-speed/
Then, I thought that maybe I just didn't free enough space on the computer's HDD for the cache, so I proceeded to move a few GBs of videos to the external hard drive. Still no difference. It couldn't be my Internet connection, since I have DSL and the Airport connection bars are to the max. Besides, there didn't seem to be as many issues with Safari, so it looked like it was Firefox-specific.
And indeed, with some research, turns out that something in Firefox 3 slows down the software considerably, but what? After some help from Google, I found a website that said exactly what to change in Firefox's advanced configs (accessible via about:config in the URL bar). After rebooting Firefox, indeed all slowdown issues were gone! Yay, a winner is me!
So, if you're having similar problems with Firefox 3 (it could apply to Windows too) -- and apparently with IE too --, check out the following site. :)
http://www.aboutonlinetips.com/optimize-firefox-and-ie-browsing-speed/