Speeding up Firefox

If you use Firefox and have found it slow starting up or laggy typing into the address bar, install the oddly named 'Vacuum Places Improved' add-on from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13878.

It adds a little icon to the status bar allowing you to defragment Firefox's places.sqlite database file with a single click- that's the file that holds all the information about your browsing history etc.

I've installed it in FF on all the computers I use and noticed a considerable improvement. On my laptop the places.sqlite file was initially 25Mb and after 'vacuuming' its 15Mb. On my desktop, Firefox had almost ground to a halt, often taking over a minute to start up, and when you clicked into the address bar it took around 10 seconds before you could actually type anything! After 'vacuuming', FF starts up in 10 seconds and typing into the address bar is fine.

I highly recommend this if you use Firefox and notice any performance issues. Obviously its not going to solve memory leak (FF's other big problem) but it's a big help nonetheless.

Just to explain - the extension doesn't delete anything, it just optimises the file that holds all the data so that that data can be found more quickly.

You can set the statusbar icon to be hidden and only reappear a certain number of days from the last 'vacuum' to remind you to run it, or it can set to automatically run every x number of days.