Tech Talk at ShieldsGroup

Recently my Firefox on my Linux box has been running slowly.

Then things became worse when I started it and it gave me a message that it couldn’t complete the install because something was wrong with install.rdf.

“Error message: install.rdf is not well formed or does not exist”

I read somewhere that I should rename my ~/.mozilla folder and run Firefox.

I did more than that.

1. I uninstalled Firefox with Synaptic
2. Then renamed ~/.mozilla to ~/.mozilla_delete_after_02012010.
3. Then I reinstalled Firefox and ran it.

Firefox ran fast and clean.

Reinstalling my plugins, it maintains good speed.

I think the install.rdf file was a corrupt update of noscript.

Man — I was at the end of my rope with Firefox this week.

It loaded so slowly that after clicking the Firefox icon, that I could click Opera and IE and both of them would load in advance of Firefox.

So I did some digging and found this from the good folks at PortableApps.com:
http://portableapps.com/support/firefox_portable#performance

The part I implemented was the Session Restore portion. The procedure reads as follows:

Disable Session Restore / Undo Close Tab – Firefox 2.0 introduced a new feature called session restore. It keeps track of all your open windows and tabs and can restore your session if Firefox should crash. While a handy feature, it does have the unfortunate side effect of writing to disk on every page load, which slows down Firefox Portable. In Firefox 3.0, this feature was enhanced to provide more features but at the cost of more disk writes (which is why Firefox Portable asks on first run if you’d like to disable it). There’s no option to disable it in the usual Tools – Options windows, but you can disable it manually.

1. In Firefox’s address bar, type in about:config and then hit enter
2. Right-click on any entry and select New – Boolean
3. For the name, enter browser.sessionstore.enabled and click OK
4. Select false and then click OK

When you restart Firefox, session restore (and undo close tab) will be disabled and you should notice an improvement in browsing speed.

Bang — Firefox is pretty fast at loading again. Almost as fast as Opera.

I may be sorry I did this because Firefox crashes on my Vista and XP machines at least daily. I use the session restore when it crashes. We’ll see how important it really is, I guess.

Thanks PortableApps.com!