Speeding up Firefox and Firebug

Last Thursday Firefox stopped working for me. Not on the web, but in a web-based user interface that I help to develop as part of my job. Every time I tried to login, the program would hang.

At first I assumed it was my fault, but by a process of slow elimination I tracked the problem down to the Firebug add-in. This is Firefox's debugger, and pretty well indispensable, so I had to get it working again. I won't bore readers any more with descriptions of all the dead ends I went down, but here for posterity is the fix.

I had to create a new Firefox profile (by default you have called 'default'). From the command line, type:

firefox -profilemanager

This brings up a simple dialog that lets you create a new profile. Of course, Firefox now looks like you've just installed it for the first time, so you have to restore any settings you want, and reinstall your add-ins. However, it fixed my problem, and Firefox/Firebug now appear blisteringly fast (I believe the program had been silting up for quite a while). It also got rid of the many incomprehensible warning messages that Firebug had been sticking into the console log since I upgraded to Firefox 4.

And now for something vaguely useful

The principal reason I had for starting a blog (apart from having somewhere to sound off) was to be able to give back a little bit of knowledge to this amazing repository that the internet has become. Now comes my first chance.

I switched to using Mozilla Firefox for web-browsing when it first came out, and haven't regretted it. Apart from its own rich set of features, the add-ons you can download give it a real edge over its competitors. Firebug and Hyperwords are both amazing, when you consider how much functionality they give you, for free.

Last week I upgraded to the latest version: Firefox 3.5. Not a great deal to see in terms of extra features, but the start up time was remarkable, unfortunately for all the wrong reasons. It was literally taking several minutes to load. Firefox 3.5 was really slow.

I hoped it might be a glitch, or it might recover by itself. No such luck. So I did the natural thing and asked Google. Bingo!

I started to follow the instructions, but when I went to the Temp folder like they said, there were so many files in there that Explorer just showed the torchlight icon for a couple of minutes, before I gave up. In the end I had to delete the files from the command line. It freed up over 5Gbytes of disc space, and Firefox now loads really quickly again.

I have a suspicion that more than one program is going to be running a bit faster now. The annoying thing is that I've bumped into this sort of issue before, a while back. These Temp folders fill up. It would be nice if the applications that put the files there had the courtesy to get rid of them when they'd finished, but clearly many of them don't. So it's left to the users, and how many of them know to look in their application data folders? I'm one that does, which is why it's annoying.