Decluttering Firefox
Posted on January 22, 2010 by LJ
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I switched to Firefox almost as soon as it came out. While I work with Microsoft products for a living, I hated working with IE6. Firefox gave me so much more… tabbed browsing, and the ability to expand functionality with extensions! Oh my, the extensions!!!!
Don’t you hate it when something that works well for a long time stops?
But it was bound to happen. Firefox slowed down. To the point where I couldn’t use it at home anymore. I would click on a site, and it would be slow to load. And then any time I was typing anything — search, URL or whatever — there was a significant lag, and sometimes my typing didn’t always show up completely.
Back to Basics
Mozilla recommends that the first thing you do is remove all extensions.
Remove my extensions? Are they nuts? My extensions make Firefox easy for me to incorporate in what I do. Still, I had to do something, so I opened up the screen to see what I could remove. Surely there were things I wasn’t using.
What I Found
If there ever was an area that needed decluttering, it was my Firefox extensions. I never realized how much stuff had accumulated. 3 different managers for GMail, tools for dissecting and reassembling web pages, and some extensions that I don’t even remember why I installed.
So out they came.
But It’s Still Slow!
The Great Shoveling of Extensions had no effect. So I had to go further. I knew it couldn’t be all the extensions, more likely the problem was in one or two of them.
So I made a list of the ones I had to have. Then I removed everything.
Zippy!
Firefox came back to a quick little browser. So I started re-adding the extensions one by one.
Problem Child Found
It turns out that the problem child was the Google toolbar. So while I miss having my Google bookmarks right there, I am currently working without the extension. And Firefox is still zipping along.
Please note this doesn’t mean it is a problem everywhere – I’m still using the toolbar at work with no problems. Go figure.
Photo by fczuardi
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Comments (7)
i thought it was just me.
i hate it now.
i can’t run firefox at all
Cheers for this. I had a very similar problem recently. damn firefox. I didnt do what you did though, I went and downloaded LYNX, SAFARI,MAXATHON….in fact, I OD’d on browsers. Lots of lost time there. Decluttering is the way.
I always hate to just stop using a program after I’ve put time and effort into it! I just couldn’t bear to leave my plugins behind.
Have you tried Google’s Chrome browser? I dislike IE and used FireFox for quite sometime. However, last year I finally tried Chrome and shortly after made it my primary browser.
I’ve been hesitant to try Chrome because I do use so many of the plugins for Firefox. I’ve heard it was very zippy, though.
It is. It’s has a very light footprint. It’s especially great for netbooks. You should give it a shot. There are a lot of extensions available.
[...] other area to de-clutter, according to LJ, is your web browser. Here is a helpful post about de-cluttering Firefox, if that’s your browser of choice. While many of the Firefox extensions are very helpful, [...]