Thanks a lot for your trick, this problem was boring me, a lot off time.

I love Firefox, but this idea seems a little crazy. There must be a better way to randomise than “scanning some temporary folders”?

I remember PGP used mouse movements in order to create keys…

Thank you! That had been a huge issue for me. Firefox was taking up to 5 minutes to come up. Runs fine once it’s up (more than can be said for IE,) but still a pain so thank you for the tip.

Would CCleaner do the trick as well?

My Vista “Users” folder doesn’t have those.

Not 100% if this clears out /all/ of the data, but using CTRL + Shift + Delete in Firefox brings up the “Clear Private Data” box. Browsing History, Download History, Saved Form and Search History, Cache, Cookies, Saved Passwords, Offline Website Data and Authenticated Sessions may be deleted using this function.

This is all well and good, but I have cookies and saved passwords I don’t want to delete. Is leaving those cookies and those passwords intact going to defeat this solution? And I also would like to know if it can be done with CCleaner.

Temp File Cleaner from http://software.addpcs.com/tfc does this quickly and effectively for you!

I knew it accessed those files, spending 20 seconds or so each startup, and I knew it must be for something absolutely worthless, but still, I had no idea of the depths of wasteful behavior that were possible.

Are they really tricks. Or just TELLING YOU HOW TO USE THE PRIVACY OPTION UNDER TOOL>>OPTIONS>>PRIVACY.

So, my Firefox on my Mac takes almost 30 seconds to bring up a window when I first launch it. Is there any hint as to how to change that weirdness? I’m not a windows or mac hater, I just want to see some way to speed up startup time.

Just install FireFox Preloader http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffpreloader/
FF will start in 2 seconds :) and you can keep your password’s , cookie’s etc.

Use CCleaner!!

then

Firefox, Tools – Options – Privacy, set minimum of 5 or 7days on “Remember my browsing history atleast” :D

Thankyou for the info! I thought there was something wrong with my pc with firefox taking around 5 minutes to load. I just ran spybot before I read your article.

Yes CCLeaner will work, as long as the right options are checked

That is NOT the same method in Vista or Windows 7. Can you fix that please? Thank you.

Firefox 3.5 went through 2 beta stages and 3 release candidates and no one discovered this until after it was released?

That seems like it should. I know CCleaner takes care of the crap in all those folders. And it does it with one mouse click instead of a bunch of hunting through hidden folders. Not to mention you can set it to automatically run on startup or at different intervals.

The Temp folder is in C:\Documents And Settings\*user*\Local Settings\Temp, not C:\Documents And Settings\*user*\Temp.

Recent Documents is C:\Documents And Settings\*user*\Recent, not C:\Documents And Settings\*user*\My Recent Documents. “My Recent Documents” might be a display name or something but I don’t see it here on my XP.

Also these paths are completely different on Vista.

Best to just use %USERPROFILE% and %TEMP% to more easily point to the directories:

XP:

%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\History
%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
%USERPROFILE%\Recent
%TEMP%

Vista/7:

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\History
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent
%TEMP%

Ah yes, almost forgot, just use the Windows “Disk Cleanup” tool, it’ll clear “Temporary Internet Files” for you. For History just use Internet Options to clear it. You can clear out Recent Documents yourself safely. For Temp, I recommend only clearing out files that were last modified before your last boot, since they’re no longer in use.

Firefox’s excruciatingly slow startup times were for randomizing security? I add randomizing applets to web sites all the time, and they take milliseconds to run; the Firefox team couldn’t couldn’t have done something similar? I can’t handle waiting several *minutes* (typical start times: 8-12 minutes) (MINUTES!) and/or running CCleaner every time I want to run my browser. Just imagine how much time and productivity has been lost to the world by the thousands of Firefox users waiting for their darn browsers to load! I live and work in my browser, and find that, for me at least, it would be utterly ridiculous for an application to take so long to load — even bloated apps like illustrator and photoshop load far more quickly. So, with enormous relief, I switched to Google Chrome, which loads in a matter of seconds and displays web pages in a flash — mere moments. And, even in this early stage, Chrome has proven to be more reliable. Without exaggeration, Chrome is simply a pleasure to use, and after dealing with Firefox’s frequent crashes and ten-minute startup times, its become a true joy in my life. I’m sorry Firefox, but you’ve been outdone — largely by this one single glitch (and the hubris that allowed it to linger far too long) — and its time for users who value their time to move on. Chrome rules.

This is the reason why I ditched you Firefox after version 3.0.

Seriously, what happened guys? You were THE browser to look forward to. Now you’re like IE.

I just love Chrome for its speed now. Even a brand new computer with Core 2 Duo 2.8 Ghz and 4 GB of RAM wouldn’t run Firefox smoothly.

Yeah, I did the same after Version 3.0, except I jumped (being a Mac user) to Safari. I dunno what happened, as Version 2 was good enough, but then the “AwesomeBar” (Who the hell wants to search their bookmarks before recently browsed stuff!? Fucking retard decision there) really screwed my liking of Firefox, and with this… I’m gonna start suggesting people actually install Safari over Firefox.

Chrome is still damn good, but the OSX version isn’t mature enough for use (No plugin support).

Windows Vista doesn’t let users get to their temp folder very easily. You can NOT access the above folders directly from Explorer. Instead click on Start, type the following command in the search box, and then hit the Enter key.

%temp%

This will open the Temporary folder where you can try to delete everything (some files may be in use). Disk Cleanup Tool will also do the same thing, but this is much quicker.

Why can noone nail it with a good browser without stupid bugs?

I have to now use a slow loading Firefox (about to try fix) or use an IE 8 that fails to load new pages in tabs 50% of the time on XP (This is a huge bug so far gone largely unnoticed).

chrome here i come, dont let me down…

So, everybody in favor of being required to “move your mouse around” as Firefox starts up send an shout out to this post!
LOL!!

A bit sad this wasn’t picked up and fixed in the Beta’s

For people who’ve totally left IE behind, I wonder if it would help ease future problems like this, to go to Internet Options, General tab, to where it says “Amount of disk space to use” set the number to 0.

I think google chrome is the worst beacause…

you cant do the things that internet does

Ok the worst to the best

1.google chrome

2 firefox (only old versions)

3 firefox (new version)

4 internet explorer 7

5 internet explorer 8

I would really love to go back to using FF. Its simply the only browser out there that is NOT supported by a big multinational corporation. But its gone downhill, from, what I suspect, complacency.

Btw, I’ve heard tremendous good press about Opera. Maybe you should give that a whirl too. Its mobile browser is awesome on the iPhone

Well, I had noticed this problem a couple of days ago, and thought deleting temporary files would be the answer. It is, IF you are willing to do it every day. Thanks, but no thanks, Firefox. I don’t have weeks to wait around for the fix, so I’ll just go find another browser.

Yeah it helped once i restart now i’m hoping it changes everything.

btw you can just enter ”%temp%” without quotations of course in the start>run menu to get to that folder.

It opens the directory instantly without having to scout around. Then just hit ctrl + a to delete them all.

Also windows comes with a built in cleaner for this, goto start>accessories>disk cleaner.
Select the main drive (c:\ most likely) and let it scan your drive, it will take a few seconds to a minute. Then check all the boxes to let it clean out all crudware files. Most people don’t realize this feature, but no need for ccleaner because this comes built in and served with windows version s as far back as 95 I think.

Speed is so important these days, I would hope Firefox will do better beta testing before releasing something like this again. Terribly slow at start and very annoying. Chrome is blowing them both away right now but I don’t trust Firefox the most for privacy. Please Fix!

don’t we have a batch file to make the processing more easier instead of the manual tweaks?

I have had so much trouble with IE 9, Firefox 3.0 and all its upgrades since, and Chrome which is more like Rust if you try to use it just for everyday… humble surfer amateur.. freezing up.. crashing, and taking so long to go from page to page.. that I went on a shopping spree.. I now use Opera most of the time. I am using Firefox to come here in hopes of a way to help this poor thing along.. but nope.. nothing but what I do anyway.. when I shut my browser down when I turn off my Pc.. I run CCCleaner and check to make sure I have not collected a new startup.

I like Opera.. it is light weight.. it does not have a lot of heavy duty plugins that will interfere with any other you might be needing .. and the speed dial bookmarking of the a blank tab is terrific time saver for me..

That clears out Firefox private data, not Internet Explorer private data (which is what is being referred to here).

It was very close that I left Firefox due to this. Found this solution by accident and am very glad to find out what was wrong with FF 3.5.

This should be a critical issue to be solved immediately before users leave FF for other browsers!

Indeed, faust has it in one… when I first found this problem, and found the solution, I just whipped up a batch file which runs every so often. Problem solved. Firefox isn’t great, but I still far prefer it to any alternative, especially Chrome. I just hate the way Chrome feels, it doesn’t make me feel like it trusts me as a user (aka, I get a strong MS feeling…)

Thanks for the article.

I used “mouse movements” as an example – maybe a bad one, but still, it was PGP’s way of generating random numbers and not depending upon PRNGs.

Generating true random numbers has always been a problem, and a website, http://www.random.org/ tries to solve this. This link: http://www.random.org/randomness/ makes for an interesting read. I’m not suggesting Firefox uses this site as a random number generator, as I don’t think the owner would be too happy!

A simple fix would be to scan fewer files and generate a hash from the contents of the files (if below a certain size!), however, would the resulting numbers be statistically independent?

the slowness also applies to mac and linux users though, so it can’t just be files related to internet explorer.

awesome tip helped me out tremendously

Wow! Was I glad to find this. I was really thinking there was something seriously wrong with my computer. I knew it had to be a problem with Firefox but I had no idea what was wrong or how to fix it. I can wait for the fix as long as I know the problem is being addressed. I simply like Firefox too much to leave because of this glitch (annoying as it is).

Why do I have to clear my Internet Explorer cache to get Firefox to run? And why is Firefox looking at it anyway?

I’m more concerned about the apparent slowness of FF once it has loaded, the increasing memory and CPU usage (338MB and 57 mins of CPU time as I write)…

Deleting these files does NOT solve the problem. :(

[...] hay otro motivo por el que Firefox puede iniciar lento en la versión 3.5. Por motivos de seguridad Firefox [...]

sgillaria……made a huge difference for me……mine now opens up dang near as fast as it did before. I am grateful. Some have noted that their FF would take a LONG time to open…mine never took more than 30 seconds or so…but now it opens in about 5 seconds. Not sure what the big difference is…maybe it makes a difference how much it has been tweaked with addons and such,

There’s absolutely no reason to panic and switch to another browser. Here’s the simple and quick way to speed it up:

http://www.myhowtoos.com/en/internet-howtoos/88-how-to-make-firefox-load-faster

Here’s a Windows script file I made by assembling various parts from around the web. Open notepad, copy and paste the code, and save it as Firefox.vbs. I tested it on Windows XP with no problems. May require tweaks for other OS versions. The script deletes the temp files and then loads Firefox for you. It cut my load time from 3 minutes back down to 3 seconds.

(You will have to change the file type in the save dialog to “All Files” or notepad will change your filename to Firefox.vbs.txt which won’t work!)

‘—– Begin Copy Here —-

SUB DeleteFiles(strDirectory)

on error resume next
Dim oFSO
Dim sDirectoryPath
Dim oFolder
Dim oDelFolder
Dim oFileCollection
Dim oFile
Dim oFolderCollection

Set oFSO = CreateObject(“Scripting.FileSystemObject”)
set oFolder = oFSO.GetFolder(strDirectory)
set oFolderCollection = oFolder.SubFolders
set oFileCollection = oFolder.Files

For each oFile in oFileCollection
oFile.Delete(True)
Next

For each oDelFolder in oFolderCollection
oDelFolder.Delete(True)
Next

Set oFSO = Nothing
Set oFolder = Nothing
Set oFileCollection = Nothing
Set oFile = Nothing
END SUB

Set wshShell = WScript.CreateObject (“WScript.shell”)
strUserName = wshShell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings( “%USERNAME%” )

DeleteFiles “C:\Documents And Settings\” & strUserName & “\Recent”
DeleteFiles “C:\Documents And Settings\” & strUserName & “\Local Settings\Temp”
DeleteFiles “C:\Documents and Settings\” & strUserName & “\Local Settings\History”

wshshell.run “”"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe”"”
set wshshell = nothing

‘— End Copy Here —

Windows 7 (and maybe Vista) users, this is the right folder:

X:\Users\Default\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows

The HISTORY and TEMPORARY INTERNET FILES folders are empty for me, though.

The multi-utilities suite Greatis Regrun – http://greatis.com/security/ – carries a little applet called Wintidy, which cleans out all of the above from FF, IE, Opera, all the Temp directories from Windows (sorry, Mac, etc. users), plus anything other files you want to “vacuum”, at the click of an icon. You decide what you want cleaned. Works really well, and the suite’s other features are really handy too.

And no, I don’t work for Greatis. I’ve just used Regrun for several years and wouldn’t be without it.

Now, if someone would come up with an effective memory manager/rescue app for Vista, so I don’t have to reboot to get some resources back….

AAAAAARGGH! In the previous post, “Wintidy” should read “WinCleaner”. Sorry ’bout that.

Now, if someone would come up with an effective memory manager/rescue app for ME….

The History and Temporary Internet Files folders are never empty as they have an index.dat file in there.

This doesn’t work for any machines of mine.

Some pages never even load.

The workaround works with Firefox 3.5.2 (Danish), bug shouldn’t this bug have been squashed by now?

I tried deleting the browsing history in IE but it did not help. I even have the option in Firefox to delete my browsing history automatically when I shut it down. Does not seem to help. Seems that option is missing in version 3.5.2 also.

Thanks to SpyER for F Fox Preloader. I dnloaded it and it works fine.
Much appreciated. My F Fox was impossible to get started before this and it was driving us crazy.

Yea, I’m very disappointed with these new versions of Firefox. I’ve used Firefox from it’s infancy, but alas I regretfully admit that I have switched to Google Chrome. I am a loyal user of Firefox, and if a version is ever released that loads in acceptable amount of time I will return to it, but in its current state the use of it is unrealistic. It’s a shame that with the release of version 3.5 Mozilla effectively destroyed almost five years worth of hard earned street credit. With Open Source’s poster child having a bug like this (and for almost two months with no EFFECTIVE patch, 3.5.1 and 3.5.2 had no effect on the issue for me), it’ll be hard to continue claiming that Open Source is as viable of an option as closed source proprietary software. Someone please post on here when this problem is finally fixed so that I can return to my beloved browser.

Disregard my prev post of Aug 29. Next day my computer was all locked up. I did a system restore and it deleted F Fox preloader. Now my first time opening F Fox is a little slow but after that it comes up very fast. I decided to keep it running all the time and at end of day I usually do a hibernate. I think this is the best I can do with this problem. Otherwise F Fox works OK. It’s just the first startup that is slow.

As someone pointed out early on you can use the diskcleaner in assessories>system tools>disk cleanup

But we shouldn’t have to do this a lot. I’m not sure why others have just now noticed this slowness either as I just last night upgraded my ff to 3.5 and it was dog slow before that- I could have taken a nap waiting for it! Come on ff pull it together! Us die-hard ff users are getting tired of it :)

I did all that was instructed above and it did make it faster, but the point is I don’t think I should have to do this again any time soon.

After updating FF to 3.5.2 on my laptop that runs Vista 64; the browser was blazingly fast! With-in a week it slowed to a crawl.
On my computer with XP 3.5.2 takes so long that i can go to the kitchen and fix a second cup of coffee waiting for it to open.
My internet connection is cable and my speed tests result are:
7.65Mb/s download and .37 Mb/s upload ( Just performed the test )
There’s a big time difference between my problem and the ones discussed here. Does this time disparity suggest that the problem is different than the one discussed here?

I agree with Tessa,
I now have 3.5.2 and it is still horribly slow, although this bug should’ve been fixed by now. Are we the only ones complaining and is nobody actually doing anything about it? In a time where the competition between browsers is based on rendering speed, FF should start a lot faster!!
(And I don’t want soms “quick loader” app in my taskbar, starting with every Windows boot)

See my post above of Aug 31. I really think this is the best solution until F Fox comes up with something we can all applaud. If anyone has some better idea, pls announce it!!!!

I switched to Chrome and am very happy with the snappy response. Reminds me of when I moved fro IE to Firefox several years ago. I suppose the program is just to complicated now.

I could NOT work another day with the slow Firefox issues…

So had to stop working long enough to research if others are having the SLOW issue, and the OTHER issue – that it takes often over a minute for FF to close once I shut it down (close the browser).

It’s a little comfort to read that I’m not the only one battling with and suffering from these FF bugs. I’ve been deleting History, temp files, etc. No affect whatsoever. Updated to latest version. No better. In fact, Its just getting worse. It’s gotten so bad I’ve gone back to IE for now.

Any idea of WHEN these Firefox bugs are going to get fixed, for real?

Here is my situation:
Defragged disk, ran Disk Clean and CCleaner, turn off FF ipv6 DNS, turn on FF pipeline (8 max), lots of other misc cleanup. Never had skype or FF Preloader. I installed AFOM 2.0 experimental addon for firefox memory leaks.

Results:
Reasonably fast startup after all this work, considering I have a dozen addons and 18 tabs.
Still slow FF shutdown – about 1 minute per Task Manager :-(
Still slow scrolling, browsing.

Two of my tabs are YouTube, and Task Manager shows 40-50 I/O Reads per second for each. I know, because when I close the YouTube tabs, the I/O Reads stop immediately. They must be memory I/O since the disk I/O light is off, and StatusbarEx addon shows no network activity. Also the liveHTTPheaders plugin shows no new web page headers. If I start or restart the video the I/O Reads go back to normal, enough to play the video I guess. If I pause the video, the I/O Reads go to zero. If I let the video finish playing, and don’t do anything else, I get the 40-50 I/O Reads per second again, forever. Using the QuickJava addon to turn off JavaScript and Java has no effect on any of this.

Even with all these addons and tabs, StatusbarEx and Task Manager both report that FF is only using 60-70Meg. However, before I started all this cleanup, it sometimes got up to 300-400Meg of memory, and took much longer (several minutes) to finish shutting down. I suspect the Youtube tabs and I/O Reads had something to do with that, too.

I wish there was a FF addon that told me which tabs were using the CPU or generating I/O.

I have found that my problems were caused by my back-up software. I use a ‘cloud’ backup system which is always on and it was incorrectly backing up the temporary directories mentioned above. Once I removed these from my back ups Firefox was back as a decent piece of software! Hooray!

I will stick with FF although it has issues, it crashes, has a bad start up time and works bad with shock wave flash 10. Sad I could not get alternative to shockwave.

Anyway people we left an evil empire and certainly cannot go back to another evil empire. Stay with FF.

Firefox 3.5 slow startups on Windows

Modify the Firefox config file: Here’s some tweaks which involve modifying the config file for Firefox. I’d heard some of these a while ago on the Mike Tech Show podcast, also at Life Rocks 2.0. It’s not difficult to edit the config file. Just type about:config in the Firefox address bar and press enter. Then type network.http in the filter field. This will filter the list down to only those with network.http in the name. Now make the following changes:
• Double click on ‘network.http.pipelining’ and set the value to true (double clicking toggles the value between true and false).
• Double click on network.http.pipelining.maxrequests’ and in the dialog box enter a value higher than the default value 4. According to Mozillazine, the maximum you can use is 8.
• Double click on ‘network.http.proxy.pipelining’ and set the value to true.
• Again in the filter field enter ‘browser.sessionstore.interval‘ (without the quotes), double click on the entry and change the value from 10000 (10 secs) to 120000 (2 minutes). This adjusts how frequently Firefox creates session restore save points. Firefox will now take a snapshot of your browsing session every 2 minutes instead of every 10 seconds.
• Right click on the page and select New->Integer. Enter the name nglayout.initialpaint.delay and then click ok. Set the integer value of this to 0 and click ok.

Firefox – sadly – is nearly useless now. Where once it was fast to load, fast to grab pages, and a pleasure, even a joy to use, it now takes 16 or 17 years to load (or so it seems), sees to debate with itself overr whether it really does want to bring up a web page or not before slowly doing so, and has become painful to use even in the best of circumstances – no matter how I tweak it.

A real shame. It was a good program once. Very good. Now, even IE looks good in comparison to it, and Chrome a joy..

R.I.P., Firefox.

@JM the new version is a little better, but still keeps crashing often. Wish they go back o the lean version of FF.

Forgot to add that wish FF kept two versions. A fancy one for people who need all the bells and whistles and a simple lean and efficient browser for others.

Like everyone else here, I was on the point of ditching FF 3.5.2 and reverting back to IE because of the ridiculous startup times. As a last effort I tried following Herminio’s tweaks above – they work!
Don’t know why exactly but I used 8 for “pipelining” and speeds are as fst as they were in FF 2.0.
I’m happy again – thanks Herminio, you’ve made a difference in the world, be proud!

I have switched to Google Chrome. No probs so far. It is super fast, does everything I want it to do and saves all my settings, bookmarks, bookmark toolbar etc. Noi more F Fox for me. I have work to do!

Ed – Can’t say I’ve noticed FF crashing, if anything it appears more stable than previous versions, but I still have a memory leak that I’e had in FF since v1.5!
What I have noticed though is that after a restart, FF takes about 20 seconds to load, if you close it again and start a new FF it comes up in about 3 seconds. I don’t know if this is FF or my firewall (Comodo) or anti vius (AVG) causing the initial delay in checks – still to try and determine that one. Generally though 3.5.2 appears to be stable.

My PC does not have a heading of “User” in “Documents and Settings”

Thanks Herminio – those config settings did the trick for me too,
deleting the temp files made no apparent difference

Thanks, deleting the temp files helped when FF started loading extremely slow.

The thing I don’t get is this… if FF is looking at these temporary files to get randomness and the recommended slowness fix involves deleting the temporary files, aren’t we wiping out the method that FF is using to get it’s randomness? I mean, if the only way to get something working is to prevent it from working, surely something is very wrong with the concept in the first place.

Hi all,
I have tried all the above suggestion to no avail. After hours of struggling I noticed that I had two Mozilla Firefox installed in my machine: One on C: and other on D:.
So here is what I have done to solve the annoying slowness:
1- Uninstall any MF from Control pannel
2- Search for any word like *mozill*.* in your machine and remove it (some mozilla files can’t be removed from some plugins folder but It’s ok)
3- Download and install the latest version of MF (currently 3.5.6)
4- Make sure to install it under C:\Program Files

Now my MF is extremely fast and I even set it as my default browser.

Cheers,

Quote: “Download and install the latest version of MF (currently 3.5.6)”
Riiiight. Do your weekly firefox uninstall/download/reinstall/uninstall/reinstall/ repeat. What ever happened to code it right the first time and TEST before releasing to the public. How can you people tolerate quick and dirty software releases.

Unfortunately firefox is simply not ready for worldwide domination. It still behaves like a concept car, nice to look at, but doesn’t really work that well. I have been using it on 10 different machines for 13 months and it is a piece of promising software but that’s all. I just rang a company becuase I could navigate to some pages- guess what? It was firefox’s fault as it worked beautifully on IE6/7/8 and opera! Seriously, all I want is the speed of IE6 without all the security issues- is that too much to ask? IE7 and IE8 are way to slow and too bloated. Opera is just a funny little cute browser but not practical enough and has issues with touchpad scrolling across all my machines- enough to ditch it too.

I’ve gone back to IE8. Every time I have to load FF either manually or through a link, it is a minimum of 30 seconds to load on my Windows 7 machine. It is now completely unusable for this reason.

Did you report it Oliver? After all, the betas and release candidates are open to all to test.

Well, Firefox was a nice program but it has been destroyed. The slow startup is unacceptable. There was a chance for this program to become the dominant browser. I wonder if a spy from microsoft or google has infiltrated the firefox team and is sabotaging the product?

please, back to basics.

I am using IE8. Much better now.

FF has to strip down to the older versions. It has become too heavy of an application, not something you need in a browser.

appears the problem is due to a conflict with my old version of symantec antivirus.

ran system mechanic, unistalled symantec products, now FF 3.5 works like a charm.

I am using McAfee. So not sure if that could be the root cause of your problem.

I have 3 computers running:

xp biz desktop 3gb mem… runs almost instant startup on firefox

vista laptop 3gb mem… runs almost instant startup on fire fox

xp desktop (only 1gb mem)… others browsers (safari, opera, start up in about 10 seconds… ie7 about 30seconds…

now: I understand the limited mem of this machine would mean slower starts overall then the other two that have 3gb mem… but Firefox USED to start up quickly… I did the suggested fixes… mostly deleting ie7′s “history and temp files” and that IMPROVED THINGS… but just marginally…THEN I FOUND THE SOLUTION (at least for me)…

and it is: THE AVG ANTIVIRUS “ADD-ON” …I disabled that in the add-ons…and now Firefox starts up in about 5 seconds… before this step it took minutes… (also, I was already using FasterFoxLite… which I had tried with little noticeable improvement… basically I disable MOST ADD-ONS…except java stuff, Fireshot (for quick screen or webpage cys), StumbleUpon… in other words on only keep ENABLED in the ADD-ONs…stuff I USE A LOT.

on my 3gb mem machines…this doesn’t matter…but check if you have an antivirus like AVG running as an addon— I have the free version…very good…but in this situation… all but prevents me using Firefox…

Safari, and Opera… are very good too…almost as quick and similar in mem usage to Firefox… but I like StumbleUpon and Fireshot too much, so I do want to mainly use Firefox…AND NOW IT’S ALMOST INSTANT STARTUP!

hope this helps many,

regards,

flashrob (website: dimestop.com if your interested)

Tried it using IE8 yet? Love it also.

Actually it is down to the developers to do testing. Relying on users to do your testing for you is just plain laziness.

Not supported by some giant corporation? Judging by the way they bend over to lick google’s rearend and violate your priacy in the meantime, I’m not so sure about that.

I don’t want to clean the history of my computer… I need them for future use…

Hello Josh! Thanks for the script…but where do I save the script to – which folder on my pc? How do I activate it? Do I need to reboot?

Hi Kelly,

I saved it as c:\firefox.vbs and then put a shortcut on my desktop that linked to it. Then, when I double clicked on the shortcut, the script file runs, deletes the temp files and then starts Firefox. You could accomplish the same thing by saving the firefox.vbs file to your desktop, but setting up a shortcut allowed me to change the icon so it looked the same as the firefox icon.

Since this post, I upgraded to Windows 7 and switched to Chrome. I haven’t tried Firefox yet. Hopefully the new version doesn’t have this issue.

Good luck!

We are april 2010 now, and Firefox is at version 3.6.3.

It became even slower. Not only startup-time, but normal use too.

It’s useless this way.

Did Microsoft buy Firefox?

IE is better now, a lot (and I tought I would never say this).

This “work around” did not work for me. Besides, In our production environment there is little time to experiement with “work arounds”.

Until Mozilla fixes this problem, I am going back to IE8. It seems to work fine without “work arounds”.

Notify me when the problem is fixed.

Firefox does start slow , just fine tune like a car ,add /PREFETCH to th e reg. key and see the diffrence,, (HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications\firefox.exe\shell\open\command
Default, REG_SZ “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” %1″ /PREFETCH).. now it loads in approx. 0.5 sec.

OS Name: Microsoft Windows XP Professional
OS Version: 5.1.2600 Service Pack 3 Build 2600
This also works on Adobe Acrobat loads in approx. 0.7sec..

I hope this helps someone….

I should have said that there is a space after the parenthesis mark (“) then add /PREFETCH .. It works better in Capitals because the program thinks you are yelling at it (A programer thing)

BTW to speed up a Win (XP at least) builtin “Disc Cleanup” just remove an entire key
[
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Compress old files
]
which forces them to evaluate on start this stupid “Old Files Compression”

Looks like a bullshit.

1. With a “factory-set” (both sets are enabled) Prefetch the Prefetch Cache populates with a FF prefetch data w/o any commandline switch.
2. AFAIK the “/prefetch” switch used *only* with an additional “:” (or “=”, I don’t remember) ending like “app.exe /prefetch:2″ and useful only when a some app loads (and don’t mixes) a mostly different set of DLLs for a different tasks (compare a reg commandlines of a wmplayer.exe for audio- and dvd- content)