Comments on: Making Firefox Launch Faster Than Awesome

By: mr fx

mr fx — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 23:28:55 +0000

Good guide for increasing the launch time of firefox, I found another guide for increasing the page load times.. this is awsome and it makes firefox way faster. http://www.nettechguide.com/ho.....ing-times/

By: BenJr

BenJr — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 04:28:18 +0000

For me compressing Firefox shaved 4-5 seconds off the startup time. I used UPX with Firefox 2.0.0.7. I do believe that most if not all the files were compressed because UPX gives you a detailed account of the files that were compressed and by how much.
Instead of using a Batch file to execute the compression, I shelled a command prompt in the Firefox folder and entered the command that way. It was much easier for me especially since shelling a command prompt in Vista is very easy.
4-5 seconds may not seem like a lot, but it breaks down to about 20-25% on my system.

By: LJ

LJ — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 13:32:14 +0000

The reason compressing the files helps launch time is because on many new computers, it takes much more time to read the data from the disk than it does to decompress it.

As an example, let’s say it takes me 1 second to read 1MB of data from the disk, but I can de-compress 10MB of data (once it’s in memory) in that same second.

If I have an uncompressed firefox, I have to read 10MB from the disk, which takes 10 seconds.

If I have a compressed firefox that is only 5MB on disk, I can read that in 5 seconds, then spend 1 second decompressing it in memory, for a total of 6 seconds.

Obviously these numbers vary based on the computer you have, etc. Since laptop hard drives are usually much slower than desktop drives, it often has more impact on laptops. In general, compressing with UPX makes the most difference when you have a relatively fast CPU but a relatively slow hard drive — again, this is most common today in laptops.

The newer firefox executeables are digitally signed, and the current UPX versions cannot compress these — so you don’t get any benefit. It’s very likely that this is the reason you’re not seeing any performance gains.

By: Fireflox

Fireflox — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 06:09:11 +0000

The only mistake i discovered in your coding of those batch files has been corrected, so i will submit them below.

1)to compress: pushd “%Program Files%\Mozilla Firefox”
for %%v in (*.exe *.dll components\*.dll plugins\*.dll) do upx “%Program Files%\Mozilla Firefox\%%v”
popd

2)to decompress: pushd “%Program Files%\Mozilla Firefox”
for %%v in (*.exe *.dll components\*.dll plugins\*.dll) do upx -d “%Program Files%\Mozilla Firefox\%%v”
popd

By: Fireflox

Fireflox — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 06:03:48 +0000

For it worked just fine( though i can’t say that your batch code was any good.in fact, all it did is cause errors).
But here is what i want to say: i timed it before and after, and the difference( between launch speeds) was 30 miliseconds, and pages were loading about 10% faster.
I don’t know about you, but don’t think it’s worth all the trouble… maybe if you send an email to those at Firefox, telling them about the flaw, because it’s simply unefficient this way.

By: $phillip$

$phillip$ — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 18:46:03 +0000

Why couldn’t you just posted a firefox up for download with all of this already done?

By: Coty

Coty — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 05:16:16 +0000

I tried this and noticed a bit of different but mostly just screwed up some stuff and I don’t know why.

Problem #1

“It wouldn’t load certain features that I had on firefox”

Problem #2

“For some reason my Myspace stand alone player won’t play or load anymore”

By: drew

drew — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 23:30:09 +0000

tell me why exactly a UPX packer would speed up launch? UPX compresses the exe, then decompresses it at runtime, creating a *slightly* slower launch, not faster. I can’t imagine why this would work – the code is not optimised or something, merely compressed, wrapped, and decompressed when the exe is run.

that’s exactly what i thought but i tried it anyway.. i notice no difference with firefox 2.0 for some reason, but it still works with a few optimized builds (but not as much as it used to). i could post the FF preloader but.. it’s not even worth it.

By: brain3k

brain3k — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 23:18:42 +0000

tell me why exactly a UPX packer would speed up launch? UPX compresses the exe, then decompresses it at runtime, creating a *slightly* slower launch, not faster. I can’t imagine why this would work – the code is not optimised or something, merely compressed, wrapped, and decompressed when the exe is run.

By: sion

sion — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 18:49:35 +0000

Well at least I learned that more extensions makes ff slower.
I’m going to get rid of some right now!
I won’t be doing this compression thing because my ff is fast enough for me.Also, it sounds too NASA for me.