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A Few Quick Fire Firefox Fixes

March 13th, 2010

There’s something about Firefox that made me take to it like a duck to water the first time I used it – perhaps it was the fact that it allowed tab browsing much before IE worked it into its code, perhaps it was because it was not as bulky as IE, or perhaps it was because I just hated Internet Explorer and was always on the lookout for a suitable alternative. And now, even with Chrome and various other options out there, I still prefer to use this orange-tinged browser that changed the way I used the Internet.

But that’s not to say that there is nothing I wouldn’t change in Firefox – in fact, one thing I hate about this browser is that it tends to crash once too often. Of course, I was always able to retrieve my session because Firefox was thoughtful enough to conveniently save my work before crashing on me. But I still needed to fix the source of the problem, and so I went looking for a solution and found one that seemed to work.

So if you’re plagued by random crashes for apparently no reason whatsoever, all you have to do is remove the plugins and extensions that you’ve added on to Firefox. They are the reason for the crashes, not all of them, but one or two rogue add-ons that disrupt your entire browsing session. When you click on Tools, you can see all the plugins under the Add-Ons tab. Uninstall those that you don’t use and disable the rest. Now reload Firefox and enable each of the plugins one at a time to check which of them is causing the crash. It is a time-consuming process, but it does get rid of those awful and annoying crashes.

And while you’re at the job of tweaking how Firefox works, here’s another tip to speed up the loading of this browser. Most users complain that it takes a while to load and is significantly slower than Opera or Chrome. I beg to differ – yes, Firefox does seem slower than most other browsers when you use it regularly and the others not so much, but that is only because your browsing history is extensive and slows down the entire loading process. To cut a long story short, Firefox by default saves a copy of the names of all the sites you visit, so when you open a new window at the start of your browsing session, the browser must recall your entire history before loading. So to speed up the process, all you need to do is delete history every few days or change your options to never save your browsing history.

In general, be careful when adding plugins – they’re usually developed by third parties, so even though Firefox is not responsible for them, it gets all the bad publicity when there is a browser crash because of rogue add-ons.

This guest post is contributed by Barbara Williams, she writes on the topic of Becoming a Computer Technician. Email her at: barbara.williams07@gmail.com.

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