Double-click (start watch) 1...5....7.......29.......1:24 STOP! OK, so i just started Firefox on my gaming rig, which doesn’t have an internet connection. I had previously configured Firefox to open to a blank page. So why is the newest version of Firefox taking so long to open? Some might say that this is because I was using a PC. Wrong! I used my church’s G5 tower to run the same test of launching Firefox and got a final time of about one minute, and you Mac users know that that’s a LONG time. So why is Firefox so slow nowadays? On top of that the previous stable version popped up with “Unresponsive Script” warnings. so one again i wondered what was wrong with Firefox. I have used it for about six yars. So why is it letting me down now?

I decided to investigate. So i cruised over to the best search engine on the net.... GOOGLE!! Once there i searched for “Firefox issues”. Clicking on the first link, I was sent to a website named “Mozilla”. This was a good sign. Looking around the seeming familiar page layout (looks like Wikipedia), I found some useful answers as to why Firefox might be having issues. Mozilla offered several reasons to explain why the browser hangs at the start. Their solution to browser hands was this:

“It has been reported recently that malicious web pages with extremely long titles can fill the browsing history file “history.dat” with so much information that Mozilla Suite and Firefox will consume large amounts of CPU and memory resources and will appear to “hang” on startup (fixed in Firefox 1.5.0.1 and 1.0.8). Close the browser completely and delete the file “history.dat” located in the profile folder to clear the browsing history. [1] [2]. Other known causes of startup hangs can be found in this article.”

This sounds like a reasonable solution to the browser hang issue. But what about the slow browing issue? Well apparently I’m not the only one who has noticed because I found this page on Yale University’s Library website.

After following recomendations from Mozilla to speed up my Firefox I received a 45% speed increase while surfing. Startup is still slow, but thats in the code and I don’t dwell there.

So Firefox is not perfect. However it’s still the best. The only concern I have is that things are getting messy with it, and it looks like they are getting worse. So keep an eye open because someday Firefox might let us all down. I would suggest preparing a nice substitute browser. Some of my recommendations are Opera Browser and Avant Browser. They both supply tabbed browsing comparable to Firefox.