Firefox Running Slow At Start Up, Here Is The Solution

I am a fan of Mozilla Firefox because of its features. I am using Firefox since my college days and never shifted to any other browser. But since I upgraded to Firefox 3 and then 3.5, It really slows down at the start up or specially when I type an URL on address bar. My Firefox was running slow and that was frustrating for me. But after digging into folders and files, I finally found the culprit for this problem.

Firefox History Data and Windows History are the reason behind my slow Firefox. When we type some URL on Firefox address bar, it tries to get it from browser history to suggest you related URLs. If you are a power Internet user and browse a huge number of sites on daily basis, You actually stores a huge data in browser history. That history will definitely slows down the really faster Firefox 3 andFirefox 3.5.

To resolve this problem, I deleted the cache of my Firefox browser but that doesn’t delete the full history file as it stores the history in a common file shared for bookmarks as well. When you delete the cache from Firefox, it deletes the files located in cache Folder. You can find the cache folder on your Vista Computer at location provided below:

C:\Users\Sanjeev\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\q67pag51.default\Cache

Note: Terms in bold may differ on your system.

By clearing cache, you didn’t delete the history of browser. To delete the history of browser, you will have to remove or rename a file named as places.sqlite located in location mentioned below. Before doing that, make sure you have closed all the instances of Firefox browser on your computer which means no running Firefox.

C:\Users\Sanjeev\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\q67pag51.default

Note: Both locations are different as you can see Local folder and Roaming folder under AppData.

Now rename the file places.sqlite to some other name say places.sqlite.bak to recognize it as backup. Thanks Raymond for sharing this tip to make Firefox really faster at start up. Now start your Firefox browser, and go to “Tools” menu.

Go to the Options under Tools and then click on “Privacy” tab. There you can see options related to Firefox history. Select the option as “Use Custom Setting For History”. Now change the filed value for “Remember my browsing history for at least” to 10 days from 90 days. Click on OK and close the window. Now restart your Firefox and you can feel the change in response time.

Now you can type any URL on Firefox address bar, Firefox will not be running slow in that case as well. If you want even more faster Firefox, You can delete the temporary files from your Windows by opening “Internet Options” from control panel. Now delete the browsing history including temporary files, cookies etc.

Now you will never complaint about firefox running slow on your computer because it will never store your browsing history for more than 10 days.