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I used to have loads of problems with Firefox, it was so slow... took several minutes to close, it would freeze regularly etc. I got so sick of having to clear the cache every few weeks.

Then one day I noticed their hidden profile manager, created a new profile and used it instead. A few months on and everything is still working like it should. No need to clear caches, it quits within seconds, no crashes and so on.

It's worth a try if you get something similar. Obviously something was screwed up with my profiles, it took a really long time to delete the old profile.



Vacuuming your Firefox profile's SQLite databases can significantly improve startup time:

http://mozillalinks.org/2009/07/vacuum-your-firefox-database...

There was a bug request to auto-vacuum profiles after an upgrade, but the bug was closed as WONTFIX:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=395020


If you read that bug, it was WONTFIX'd because they chose a different way of scheduling vacuums.


Yep, I used to have a few problems with my addons. Various windows would stop appearing or only partially appear, tree-style-tabs would have funny behaviour. I would assume it was because I was running the latest FF and the add-on hadn't caught up yet...

However, simply creating a new profile solved all my problems. Now, any time I run into an issue, I just create a new profile.

I know some people will simply suggest switching browser, but nothing handles hundreds or thousands of tabs better than firefox, and I'm not looking to change how I browse the web just to go easy on my browser...!


A corrupted sqlite database file could do that.


I shudder to think how much of the Firefox's reputation for slowness comes from busted profiles :(




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