Everybody who’s experienced the fun of customizing Firefox to his or her liking has a favorite extension. Whether it’s the improved navigation and session-saving friendliness of TabMixPlus or the convenience of All-in-One Sidebar, I can’t imagine living without some of them. It’s empowering to tweak your browser as you see fit, but the price often comes in the form of slower performance and memory hogging. Though Firefox has long been accused of leaking memory, there are simple ways to reduce RAM usage and increase speed. Here are a few extensions and tips designed to lighten your load.

• Disable the autoupdate feature in switchproxy (Note: This will cause you to lose the update link to pull from)
• Disable check for notification of switchproxy updates.

Also disabling User Agent switcher should improve performance slightly if you have that extension installed.

Link prefetching is a browser mechanism, which utilizes browser idle time to download or prefetch documents that the user might visit in the near future. A web page provides a set of prefetching hints to the browser, and after the browser is finished loading the page, it begins silently prefetching specified documents and stores them in its cache. When the user visits one of the prefetched documents, it can be served up quickly out of the browser’s cache.

Google makes use of this technology when you search. On some searches, Google tells your browser to start downloading the top result as soon as the results page is finished loading. If you happen to click on the top result, it is already preloaded in the browsers cache, and will load quicker.

The way that Google accomplishes the prefetching is by using a link element that Firefox and Mozilla support.

<link rel=”prefetch” href=”http://www.forevergeek.com”>

Apparently Google only uses this when it is most likely that the user will click on the first result. For instance, if you search for “Stanford”, the website for that university will be the first result, and probably the one you are most likely to click on.

Of course the drawback is that you could end up with files in your cache that you did not actually visit, so it would mean cleaning out your cache more often.

You can also disable the prefetch function in Firefox using the following commands:

1. Type “about:config” the address bar.
2. Scroll down to the setting “network.prefetch-next” and set the value to “False”.

Here’s something for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up:

1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

If you’re using a broadband connection you’ll load pages MUCH faster now!

More Firefox Tips

• Firefox Optimization Tips
• Fix Firefox Slowdowns
• A Beginner’s Guide to Firefox
• Duplicating your Firefox Profile
• Recently Closed Tabs Feature on Firefox 2
• When Downloads stop Working