The Ultimate Guide on How to make Flock or Firefox Run Faster

Having trouble with a slow Flock or Firefox browser? Been looking at all the hack pages where they have you messing around in the about:config area?

I have the answer for speeding up Flock and/or Firefox. And you’re not going to like it.

First off, let me say that I have one of the most badass laptops on the market today. Power is not an issue here. Nor is memory. It might be for you, which would make the desperate need for Flock or Firefox to “go faster” even more desperate.

Here’s how you speed up Firefox or Flock:

1. Turn off anything that says it is an “add-on.”

If you’ve been a bit overzealous with add ons, you’re probably seeing where I’m going here. You have a problem. This is an intervention. We’ll get you fixed up in a jiffy with the following 3 steps:

1. Turn off all add ons for Firefox or Flock that you don’t use.
2. Then seriously think about turning off the ones you use only occasionally.
3. Then turn off all the rest your add ons if you want Flock or Firefox to be as fast as they can possibly be.

Add ons are the devil.

They are created to make you think you’re doing something cool or saving time. But behind the scenes, if you do a little digging, you can trace all add ons for Firefox back to satan himself, posing as an assortment of programmers.

You might have thought that the StumbleUpon add on for Firefox was a cool little time saver. Do me a favor. Open a new tab and type about:config in the address bar. Scroll down. If you are running the StumbleUpon add on for Firefox or Flock, you’ll see the devil in the details. That one add on will add up to 5 years to your load time.

You may think you’re saving time because of those neat little buttons on the StumbleUpon toolbar which allow you to Stumble any page you’re on without having to go to the StumbleUpon site.

This argument is like the “clean” electric car. Or the “zero emission” electric car. The electricity generated to run that car comes from coal. It’s just displacing the emission from your tailpipe to the power plant, but the effect is the same.

It’s a flim flam job, man! A shell game! Wise up! The “man” just wants to distract you with shiny things so you don’t notice that you’ll be as old as John McCain by the time your browser loads completely.

StumbleUpon’s toolbar for Firefox might “save” you time if you are comfortable ignoring the fact that using it is why Flock or Firefox take so damned long to load.

I don’t want to pick on the StumbleUpon Firefox add on exclusively. I said all add ons are the devil and I meant it.

Everything you add to your Firefox browser creates more work for it. Flock is even worse because you are already running all the friend crap constantly in the background as it checks in on your Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Pownce and other social accounts – constantly.

(I’m a Flock user. I’m also interventioning myself here.)

2. Tabs are the devil.

I like to run about 8 tabs at startup. I would like to run more, like 20 or so, but I’m afraid I’ll either get caught in a time-space-discontinuum-fart or my wait at startup will cause me to go Rip Van Winkle on it’s ass.

The best way to make Firefox and Flock load up faster is to run NO TABS at startup. Of course, we’re not going to listen to this advice, are we?

So the next best thing is to limit your tabs to your email, your blog admin login page, and maybe a stats program or something you absolutely always check the minute you fire up your browser.

You can forego loading up PerezHilton.com every time you start Firefox. Hey, there’s a war going on, we all have to make sacrifices.

Flock and the Google Toolbar

One add on that I absolutely must use is the Google Toolbar. Except Flock has prevented me from running it because they’ve determined it is evil and dangerous. I literally cannot override Flock on this. It simply says “hell no, you’re not allowed to run the Google Toolbar. It’s unsafe. And stop trying to load older versions. We’re not stupid you know. We’re cutting you off for your own good.”

Why Flock hasn’t determined other more deserving and frivolous add ons are just as dangerous is beyond me. You’ll have no problem running tons of idiotic ram destroyers (with the cute sounding name “add-ons) found on Firefox Add-ons. Yeah, gremlins were cute too till you got a drop of water on them and all hell broke loose.

C. Consider not using a browser at all…

Always start with the easy stuff when troubleshooting. Have you tried not running Flock or Firefox at all?

Because there are no real solutions to the Firefox/Flock slowness issue for people who just want to run whatever the hell they want and still do it uber fast with no errors or lockups, the only real solution is surfing the web without a browser. It is hard to get used to, but it is blazing fast. Your only limit is your imagination because you’ll be using it exclusively to spider the web with the power of your mind.

And let’s not get all crazy and think IE is any better. It loads fast as hell because it doesn’t do anything! Once you set up IE to do all the stuff your Firefox browser does with 50 add ons, which isn’t even possible, you’ll go running back to Firefox hoping it will forgive you for ever leaving it.

4. Properly inflate your Firefox and Flock browsers…

Sometimes the most effective solution is the simplest. Until I realized the poor mileage resulting from improperly inflated browsers, I thought the whole problem was simply a lack of system resources. Now that I have my Flock browser properly inflated to 32.5 pounds, I know I am using less electricity, which is good for the environment.

D. Stop trying to make it faster…

The time you spend reading blog posts about the latest, freakishly illogical way to make Firefox or Flock run faster could have been spent waiting for 20 pages to load! Dude, the guys who created these browsers are the ones to make them faster. They’ve failed thus far. What makes you think your no-programming butt is going to do any better by reading a blog post about it?

Bottom line…

Surfing the web is a pain in the ass. No matter if you switch from DSL to broadband, or move up to a T1 line, we’re never going to be satisfied. Let’s get used to that. Since the 1200 baud modem we’ve been seeking a mythical Holy Grail of speed that is impossible to attain until we (meaning smart people other than us) attain it. Sit tight.

We’ll all have a laugh one day about how long it used to take to load 500 add-ons, 50 tabs, and all of our friends latest epiphonies on every concievable social network known to mankind.

With no one stepping up and saying outright: “This is as fast as it gets, stupid!” everyone, including me, will continue looking for some way we can squeak more out of our about:config lines.

Time travel will become a reality before these browsers will work better and faster while running tons of add ons and loading every website we’ve ever visited in tabs on startup.

Of course, if none of this satisfies you, you can always go check out what people are doing to make themselves feel better about the problem. It might not speed up or fix your Firefox / Flock browsers, but you’ll feel like you are in control of the situation.

And isn’t that all we really want?

Note: I don’t condone any of the following “fixes” and if you screw up your entire life from doing the things people recommend below, it was bound to happen at some point anyway. Darwin was a bitch.

How to speed up Firefox (Time saver: these are the directions everyone is using to get people to visit their site for the search term “speed up firefox.” You don’t need to click around thinking there is something else out there. They are all the same exact directions everywhere you go!)

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Tagged as: firefox hacks, flock hacks, speed up firefox, speed up flock