BloatedFox

Firefox – pile of crap!

Was my final assessment after all the extensions I had installed meant my one and only Firefox profile, ate up 1GB of memory.  Took over 2 minutes to load.  And rattled along like a paddle steamer in the middle of a drought.  But it had all my passwords, bookmarks, automatic this, auto that, and – once it loaded, settled down, browsing however slovenly was somewhat a joy.

But it was time for radical treatment, to prune this overwhelming bush back to something more manageable.  As used to occur with XP once to many applications were in/uninstalled, caused it to run like a brick pulling a tractor, the only cure was a format and clean operating system re-install.

So down I dug and created two additional profiles, two bare bone profiles. 

But even with the extension list pared to the bone, there are simply some things I can’t live without: i.e., noscript, finjan and mouse gestures.  Simply typed those into the add-on search section of mozillas’ website downloaded and installed.

A quick restart later, everything in the browser was looking a bit sparse (I had forgotten how boringly dull the default theme looked), so decided to install adblock. 

Final browser restart, visited my usual sites and considering the time and connections, I was once more impressed with how speedy it (Firefox 3.0.10) actually is when it’s not a bloated loaded down monster.  Admittedly it’s still slower to start up than Chrome 3 or Opera 10, but it’s faster than IE 8 and Safari – on my system. 

With Firefox’s faster engine and other associated tweaked bits in 3.5 soon to bolt from the stable, my three suitably primed profiles armed, it looks as if my love-in with FF is back on, in the love fest that calls itself the interweb!