There are those who believe Firefox is headed the way of Netscape. If you don’t remember Netscape became a slow bloated fat browser that no one wanted to use any more. But, there was light on the horizon, the new kids known as Firefox had a winner up their sleeve which would be a new light and highly customizable browser.

But now some seem to think Firefox is becoming slow and bloated just like Netscape did but due to the highly customizable nature of Firefox is it right to really blame the browser itself for becoming slow. I don’t think so.

Many of the problems with Firefox can be traced to extensions aka add-ons, toolbars or anything else that you might have installed to run within Firefox.

If you think your installation of Firefox is becoming slow or slower than it was when you first installed it, reinstalling it may or may not fix the problem so here are some things you can try. Start Firefox in Safe mode, this will start it without any of the installed extensions or toolbars, see if it’s faster, if it is then try tracking down the offending extension.

You could also try reading 15 Firefox Tips, I am especially fond of the network optimization section but one thing to note is if Adblock Pro is installed, set it to “Optimized” instead of Turbocharged which can cause problems on websites with lots of images.

Lots of people had lots of things to say about Firefox and Wired Magazine did a pretty good job of sorting it all out but I must bring one point to light. The Maxthon browser is presented in a good light near the end of the post. I do not like the Maxthon browser for the simple fact that it is built on the IE engine.

For the record, I use Firefox and Opera, I do not have a problem with either but it seems that some people might.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2007 at 12:00 pm under Internet.

Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.
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