I am using Firefox portable from a USB drive in internet cafes in Thailand. The drive is USB 2, but most of the computers are the slower USB 1.
I find that Firefox is very slow to load (approx 2 minutes) and sometimes slow to respond (perhaps when it is loading a page) - I just have to wait for it to finish whatever it was doing and the hourglass goes away before I can e.g navigate in the bookmark menu. Also if I delete or add a bookmark, this takes perhaps more than half a minute before I can do anything else. When closing Firefox, the application disappears immediately, but firefox.exe persists in the processes for some time.
Other applications that I access from my drive are not anywhere near as slow. I don't think firefox was as slow a couple of versions ago!?
So, do other people have this problem? What could be causing it?
Many thanks for your help.
James
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a corrupt profile or an/many extension/s.
----
Ryan McCue
Cube Games
Life is like a sewer. You only get out of it what you put into it.
(Tom Lehrer)
"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate."
Possible reasons:
You have a lot running on your drive.
You have a lot running on the host PC.
You use a USB1.1 port or device.
Any combination of these.
Vintage!
Thanks for your suggestions. I have only Adblock, ImglikeOpera, and Adblock filterset extensions. Two themes. So I don't think that is the cause. True there is probably 1.1 port. I don't think many apps are running on the different host pcs I have used, and unless I have a virus my scanner doesn't pick up, there's nothing else running from the USB drive (apart from PApps Menu). I don't think it's a corrupt file, as I did a new install with this latest FF2. Also I've kept the default 0Mb cache. So let me ask for some feedback: -
When you add or delete a bookmark, how long does it take?
I don't understand why it should take so long - I mean, presumably ff has only to make a small change to a small file and save it. I would expect this to be done almost instantaneously!?
FF2 has a built-in session manager, and allows you to undo closed tabs. Both features write to the drive every time you do pretty much anything. This is bad for both speed and drive life. Here's instructions on disabling it.
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=2536472#2536472
Also, it should be pointed out that a new install doesn't mean your profile isn't corrupt, especially if you copied the old profile into the new installation.
If it's USB 1.1, you're simply gonna have to deal with slowness. USB 1.1 is *VERY VERY* slow compared to everything else. Running apps over USB 1.1 will actually work, but it will be VERY slow and is NOT RECOMMENDED unless you're stuck and can't do anything else.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I've just done a write-up on performance that should help you out:
https://portableapps.com/support/firefox_portable#performance
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Hey John,
In order to disable Session Restore / Undo Close Tab you need to set browser.sessionstore.enabled to FALSE. Your doc in https://portableapps.com/support/firefox_portable#performance
says to set it to TRUE.
Thanks. Fixed it.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Thanks for your suggestions and link. I have followed your advice, but still find firefox as slow as before. It's great to have firefox as a portable app, and worth waiting for it to load up etc but I hope something can be done to really speed it up. But if not, well, that's life
Kind regards
James
I've just switched to OPera, and it works like a dream. It opens in seconds, and as everything is written to a temporary file on the host computer, there are no problems. The difference between this, and waiting for a couple of minutes for Firefox to load, and frequent pauses while browsing, and waiting for a minute to delete a bookmark, and waiting for a couple of minutes for firefox to close, is immense. Perhaps this would be a better approach to follow for Firefox?
http://www.kejut.com/operaportable
Anyway, I'll check out a future release of Firefox, and I appreciate your work.
Kind regards
James
The Opera packages store your cache to the local hard drive even when you set Opera to disable it, which isn't really portable and is a big privacy issue. Just something you should be aware of.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I don't know why this isn't working for me, but I have added everything properly to the config, and I still can kill the process and then when I restart FFP, it asks if I want to restore, when I say yes, it does. Is there something else?
I've added browser.sessionstore.enabled FALSE
.max_tabs_undo 0
.resume_from_crash FALSE
.resume_session FALSE
.resume_session_once FALSE
Am I missing something? Oh yeah, I'm running 2.0.0.1