Speeding up Firefox

I've been suffering with a very slow Firefox 3.0.1 lately, and just figured
out how to cure this.

Thought the rest of you might want to try it and see if it helps your
experiences with FF3.

There are several bug reports concerning heavy drive thrashing and slow
operation. These all boil down to the way FF3 is handling some data.

To help people identify Phishing sites, forgeries (phorgeries?) and general
ickiness, FF3 contacts Google.com for EVERY http request. EVERY REQUEST.

And then it saves the results into 'urlclassifier3.sqlite' in your profile.

This file grew to more than 50MB, at which point I read that you could
'vacuum' it using 'sqlite3' to drop the unused database entries. I did this,
it shrank to 33MB, a savings of 17MB... but the thrashing continued.

If you will disable the Google checks, then exit FF3 and delete the
'urlclassifier3.sqlite' file from your profile, your FF3 experience will be
much nicer, albeit at the expense of some assistance in Phish Site Phinding.

Turn off these two options: (under preferences)

Security -> "Tell me if the site I'm visiting is a suspected Attack site"
Security -> "Tell me if the site I'm visiting is a suspected forgery"

Close the preferences window, exit Firefox, then delete the
'urlclassifier3.sqlite' file:

rm .mozilla/firefox/*/urlclassifier3.sqlite

The file WILL be recreated upon the next start of Firefox3, but it's only
32KB in size, and isn't expected to grow since the two "Tell me" options are
off.

It's made a world of difference in the browsing experience for me.

Hopefully this helps others.

Loni 

My thanks to him for making this information available