How to Speed Up Firefox for Web Development

Posted on 07/03/2009 @ 02:40AM

Hands down, Firefox wins as the developer's favorite browser. With Firebug as the de-facto standard development tool and so many other great extensions, other browsers are supplementary or used for QA only.

The downside to the hardcore coolness of Firefox addons is that adding a bunch of them can make the browser sluggish; slow restarts + slower page renders = lower productivity. Well, I've got a few tricks to give FF a kick in the pants when it starts getting lazy. Sheck it out.

Make AJAX Sites Into Desktop Apps With Prism

Rich web applications like Gmail can be memory intensive and may have to be restarted from time to time, and if you have other tabs open this can mess up your workflow.

Mozilla Prism is a Firefox extension which lets you embed any web page in a desktop application. This not only gives you fast access to your favorite RIA's, but also takes some of the workload off your browser by running the site in a separate thread. In addition, restarts won't screw up your other open tabs.

Run Separate Firefox Configurations

I use a hell of a lot of Firefox plugins, everything from Firebug with mutiple addons, to a Lorem Ipsum generator. These cumulatively contribute to slowing FF down, especially on restarts.

It was unbeknownst to me until recently that you can actually run multiple configurations of Firefox simultaneously. So in my case, I have a dev config (with Firebug and all my dev extensions) and my normal browsing config (extra light and zippy).

Running FF from the command line with some params will give you an instance in one profile or another:

        /path/to/firefox-bin -no-remote -P profilename &

...where profilename is either "default" or the name of a profile you've created. To make this even quicker, I aliased the commands in my .bash_profile:

        alias ff='/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -no-remote -P default &'
        alias ffdev='/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -no-remote -P dev &'

So starting the two instances is as simple as opening a Terminal window and running ff and ffdev.

Got more Firefox performance tips? Let me know.