Here is my own solution to how you speed up the load time of Firefox.

1. Create a shortcut of the Firefox icon, it's OK to change the name such as "Firefox prestart"

2. Select the shortcut icon, right-click, choose properties, find the box target (it is probably this: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Firefox\firefox.exe")

3. Add the following parameter -silent afterwards, do not forget a space after the quotation mark. Ie "C:\Program Files (x86)\Firefox\firefox.exe" -silent

4. Click OK to save the change.

5. Then drag the icon to the Autostart folder (see "All Programs", "Start Button") and drop the icon there.

6. Restart the computer.

Now, Firefox will be loaded when Windows starts up. But after being "booted" minimized, Firefox will be closed down again and do not stay in memory.

The result is that you can "cold start" Firefox as if it was a "warm start"!

On my computer, I can now cold start Firefox in 2-3 seconds, not bad compared to before approx. 15 seconds .....

How much faster Firefox will load on your computer depends mainly on your hardware (CPU, harddrive, etc). If you are a lucky owner of an SSD, Firefox will probably start more or less instantly ....

Check it out :)

Total windows boot time may increase (not necessary), but it's in any case barely notable.

Regarding the windows boot up time:

A LOT of programs want to prestart at a boot up. But you can in fact unload most of them => windows will start faster.

A program I can recommend to take control what shall be loaded or not is StartupDelayer http://download.cnet.com/Startup-Delayer/3000-2344_4-10068235.html

It's very simple to understand how it operate. What you can delete/or disable from startup at boot up depends of course, but the most.... in my case I deleted ATI's "StartCCC" and all of Adobe's files.

Test by disable a program and see if all works fine, if so you can event. also delete it.

When that done, you can optionally take one of the other startup programs (except your "Firefox prestart") and delay it with let say 1 second - this just to make sure the the FF prestart has completed before the last startup-program.

Save. Restart your computer.

Done.

I can almost promise you that your windows will start up faster - just time it (before and after) to check!

Another ridiculously simple thing you can check:

I used to have www.google.se as my homepage in Firefox. With this homepage loaded, as well as a few addons (6 items), I had a cold start in about 15 seconds.

But just by swapping the homepage for the included Firefox Google page one looks at a new installation, I reduced cold start time to 6-8 sec ..... that's a cut of half the time!

If you want to test and see if it works also on your computer then write about: home into the address bar. Then go through the Menu, Tools, Options and choose this as your new homepage.

Appreciate your feedback: [Email Removed by Mod]

didn't work for me :( thanks anyway

warm start firefox, kill my pc start up. Very2 slow. So i try to change my G**gl* Chr*m* Shortcut Icon. I change it to Firefox Icon. And I Change the home page to http://www.google.com/firefox?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

Voila my G chr*m* turn to firefox.

With Super speed start up loading.

Bye2 Firefox.

Grrrrrrrrrreat work! Simple, but effective. You have saved my day!!

Why does is take a long time to browse some websites in Firefox vs. IE?

Search all files and folders including hidden files for places.sqlite and rename it to places.sqlite2 . Restart firefox and be amazed at the speed.

To mangajack:

places.sqlite is a database file kept in Mozilla's "profile" map, where all your personal preferences, bookmarks, etc are stored.

Places.sqlite files are immediately recreated - if you rename or delete them - next time you start Firefox.

The eventual increase in speed/responsiveness you experience is due to you have deleted your cache. Nothing else.

By time your cache expands. The positive effect you may notice when your browser can (re)open a previously visited page at the beginning will after a time of browsing fade off as the cache posts increase.

I personally have turned off the cache storage. I do not see benefits anymore to use cache for the sake of speed.

Besides of that - by cleaning out history, cookies, etc on exit your browser, you decrease your exposure for security threats.

Basically your tip is good, but you could have got same constant effect by just clean your browser's history and make sure to it will not save any history (turn off cache) - go to Menu, then Options, then Privacy and change the settings.

Finally, it have nothing to do with the slow startup of Firefox.

I test nightlies of Firefox (not officially released versions of Firefox).

Latest days Mozilla have landed a fix on one of the major bugs and I can notice a dramatic improvement already on the startup speed! :)

More will surely follow. But as I understand, it will not be released official until Firefox 6.0 (planned to be released august/september 2011).

You can test these builds (at own risk!): http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/

By doing the following I believe I reduced my Firefox 4 startup time significantly:

Run Regedit and go to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters

Change EnablePrefetch to 2 (boot only) if it's not already.

Firefox is spiraling downward! Constant "hanging" will not "cut the mustard" long with clients. Is there an alternative or a solution, Firefox?

If there are lot of unused applications and games on your PC, they can fill up the space of your hardware and affect the daily used programs. By deleting these unused programs, you can increase the speed of your Mozilla Firefox. For uninstalling the programs, you have to click the ‘Start’ menu and open the ‘Control Panel’. Then select ‘Add or remove programs’. Then a list will appear. Click all the programs you you want to remove from this list. Then the box will be highlighted and other options will be found on the right side. Click ‘Remove’ tab and follow the instructions given by the uninstaller program.

I tried every "solution" I could find on the Web. There is only one thing that worked for me. And I had to discover it myself.

First, start Firefox and go to Help / Restart with Add-Ons Disabled. You may find, as I did, that this allows Firefox to start lightning fast! That's great, except what a bummer. Now you can't use any of your Add-Ons that come in so handy. So I enabled each one, one-by-one -- and could not find any specific one causing the problem. But it did tell me there was something going on.

Second, I stumbled across a setting under Tools / Options / Advanced / General Tab -- look for the section marked Browsing. Deselect the item labeled "Use Hardware Acceleration when Available". THAT worked -- but it's a compromise. It's not as fast as Disabling EVERY Add-On, but it's much faster than when you have this selected.

So I hope it works for you! None of the Speedy-this and Faster-that seemed to help. None of the Memory-fix options helped. Only this one simple de-selection.

I had the same problem and tried everything. Then I tried clearing the download list (Ctrl+J / Cmd+J), which contained all downloads since I installed Firefox (thousands of items).

That fixed the slow startup issue for me. If you haven't already, you could try this. Hope it helps!

It looks like there are several solutions to this problem. I tried everything mentioned above, but none of it worked. Then in a flash of inspiration, I decided to create a new profile. That fixed the program:Firefox immediately started running more normally. The only issue was that I had to reinstall my add ons and and work through the other aspects of personalizing the program. If you apply this solution, be sure that you synchronize your settings so that you don't lose your bookmarks.