Make Firefox fast again

fast_firefox.md

Recommended Extentions:

uBlock Origin

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/

Settings

Make sure the following options are off:

• Disable pre-fetching

Rationale: Not doing this will significantly slow down navigation, as Firefox won't prefetch any content before clicking.

JSLibCache

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/jslibcache/

Settings

Make sure the following options are on:

• Allow header modification

Rationale: Otherwise many Javascript libraries won't be fetched from local storage - as they have parameters on their URLs in the HTML code. This isn't going to break any website.`

Make sure to copy the uBlock rules provided, to your uBlock settings, to avoid uBlock interfering:

1. Go to the uBlock rules
2. copy them
3. Open uBlock's Dashboard
4. Go to the My rules tab
5. Paste them & hit Save, then Commit

Cache Longer

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cache-longer/

Set and forget.

Rationale: Increases the time items will be stored in the browser cache. This increasing the chance that network ressources won't need to be fetched. As NVMe/SSD storage is cheap and lightning fast compared to network requests, this has the potential to improve load times significantly.

Recommended Browser settings

Normal Browser settings

1. Go to about:preferences#privacy
2. Select Custom
3. deactivate all filters in this section
4. Scroll down to Security -> Deceptive Content and Dangerous Software Protection
5. Disable Block dangerous and deceptive content

Rationale: Those filters use a lot of CPU time to process, and are not very helpful - except for newbies. The Dangerous Software filters may actually even block downloads the user want to fetch, that's why it is recommended to disable these.

about:config settings

General tweaks

network.captive-portal-service.enabled = false # don't try to find captive portals
network.notify.checkForProxies = false # don't try to find proxies

Browser cache

browser.cache.disk.capacity = 8192000 # Increase cache size on disk to 8 GB
browser.cache.disk.smart_size.enabled = false # force a fixed max cache size on disk
browser.cache.frecency_half_life_hours = 18 # lower cache sweep intervals
browser.cache.max_shutdown_io_lag = 16 # let the browser finish more io on shutdown
browser.cache.memory.capacity = 2097152 # fixed maximum 2 GB in memory cache
browser.cache.memory.max_entry_size = 327680 # maximum size of in memory cached objects
browser.cache.disk.metadata_memory_limit = 15360 # increase size (in KB) of "Intermediate memory caching of frequently used metadata (a.k.a. disk cache memory pool)"

GFX rendering tweaks:

gfx.canvas.accelerated = true
gfx.canvas.accelerated.cache-items = 32768	
gfx.canvas.accelerated.cache-size	= 4096	
layers.acceleration.force-enabled = false
gfx.content.skia-font-cache-size = 80	
gfx.webrender.all = true	
gfx.webrender.compositor = true	
gfx.webrender.compositor.force-enabled = true	
gfx.webrender.enabled = true	
gfx.webrender.precache-shaders = true	
gfx.webrender.program-binary-disk = true
gfx.webrender.software.opengl = true
image.mem.decode_bytes_at_a_time = 65536	
image.mem.shared.unmap.min_expiration_ms = 120000	
layers.gpu-process.enabled = true
layers.gpu-process.force-enabled = true
image.cache.size = 10485760
media.memory_cache_max_size = 1048576	
media.memory_caches_combined_limit_kb = 3145728
media.hardware-video-decoding.force-enabled = true
media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled = true

Increase predictive network operations

network.dns.disablePrefetchFromHTTPS = false
network.dnsCacheEntries = 20000
network.dnsCacheExpiration = 3600
network.dnsCacheExpirationGracePeriod = 240
network.predictor.enable-hover-on-ssl = true
network.predictor.enable-prefetch = true
network.predictor.preconnect-min-confidence = 20
network.predictor.prefetch-force-valid-for = 3600
network.predictor.prefetch-min-confidence = 30
network.predictor.prefetch-rolling-load-count = 120
network.predictor.preresolve-min-confidence = 10

Faster SSL

network.ssl_tokens_cache_capacity = 32768 # more TLS token caching (fast reconnects)

Disable network seperations

fission.autostart = false # disable enhanced protection between threads/processes of the browser (which uses LOADS of memory to do)
privacy.partition.network_state	= false # don't seperate the network state (e.g. the cache) by top level domains)

Reduce the number of processes

dom.ipc.processCount = 1
dom.ipc.processCount.webIsolated = 1

Rationale: By default Firefox launches as many processes as you got CPU cores. This is highly counter productive, as this leads to much more memory usage as necessary. In addition switching tabs may now result not only in having to load the content back from the swap into memory, but also swapped in duplicated libraries etc.

Finishing touches:

• Restart firefox

Go to about:support then scroll down to "Places Database" and select "Verify Integrity". This will rewrite the database.

Scroll up again and select "Clear startup cache" on the right side.

• Restart firefox

Nice to have extensions

I don't care about cookies

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-about-cookies/

Set and forget.

Bypass Paywalls Clean

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywalls-clean/

Automatically bypass some paywalls.

Downside: Needs often new permissions, if an update adds a site to the supported list. - You'll get notified with an ! mark on your "hamburger menu" icon.

Consent-O-Matic

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/

Set and forget.

Cookie AutoDelete

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autodelete/

Go to settings and make sure the following are off:

• Show Notification After Automatic Cleanup
• Enable Support for Container Tabs

SponsorBlock - Skip Sponsorships on YouTube

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/

Configure skip categories to your likings.

Changelog

2023-07-07

• add browser.cache.disk.metadata_memory_limit
• Remove "cache cleaning" from finishing touches (as it's not really necessary and confuses people)

2023-04-15

• set layers.acceleration.force-enabled to false (as it may increase CPU usage)

2023-02-26

• Remove uBlock Origin's Disable hyperlink auditing unckecking recommendation (no idea why I've added that)
• Organize Settings for Add-Ons under headlines
• Improve explanation of how to apply JSLibCache's uBlock rules
• Add Rationale to some settings, to avoid that people have to google
• Fix browser.cache.frecency_half_life_hours
• Minor changes/fixes to formatting
• Reduce process counter down to one

You're going to break A LOT of sites with the cache longer extension, and from my experience it's not worth it.

Instead, I would love a min-cache-ttl, similar to how dnsmasq works, so you could force the minimum time.

I'll have a look at creating this 😃

Hello

so I've applied all the tweaks. The problem is that preview thumbnails on twitch don't refresh periodically like it used to. So I have no idea what's going on in the streams. What settings do I need to change back ? Thank you.

Hello

so I've applied all the tweaks. The problem is that preview thumbnails on twitch don't refresh periodically like it used to. So I have no idea what's going on in the streams. What settings do I need to change back ? Thank you.

image.cache.size
image.mem.shared.unmap.min_expiration_ms

set to default

Question guys, all this options are the same in windows? It work very well in linux, but i've migrated my libreworlf from linux to windows and use this settings, but it is slow

Also disable exploit settings of windows defender and allow librewolf folder.
Did you know how can improvement for windows 11 24h2?

Should I change a gfx.webrender.software.opengl = true ?
I am using rtx 4070 and i5 14500 but both works bad, I've tring change between gpu and igpu but both works very slow.

Thank u very much !!

Hi, since Firefox 135.0 there is another new option/flag: dom.ipc.forkserver.enable; I've set it to true (currently I am on Firefox 135.0.1) and has made evidents performance increaseaments: Firefox consume less RAM and pages load faster.
My system info/HW:

Manjaro Linux, 16 GB DDR3 RAM, Firefox's profile on RAM, cpu Intel Core i5-3210M @ 4x 3.1GHz (Ivy Bridge); so: is a pretty old hardware, and after weeks I can confirm that dom.ipc.forkserver.enable set to true, has helped a lot.

Hi, since Firefox 135.0 there is another new option/flag: dom.ipc.forkserver.enable; I've set it to true (currently I am on Firefox 135.0.1) and has made evidents performance increaseaments: Firefox consume less RAM and pages load faster. My system info/HW:

Manjaro Linux, 16 GB DDR3 RAM, Firefox's profile on RAM, cpu Intel Core i5-3210M @ 4x 3.1GHz (Ivy Bridge); so: is a pretty old hardware, and after weeks I can confirm that dom.ipc.forkserver.enable set to true, has helped a lot.

Thanks man, i want to try it in windows 11. should ir works there?

Thanks man, i want to try it in windows 11. should ir works there?

If you have at least Firefox 135.0, I think so. Try it out and report back.

I'm on 135.0.1 and I don't see dom.ipc.forkserver.enable available in about:config

I don't see dom.ipc.forkserver.enable available in about:config

Strtange, for me is here; proof:

Linux Only

Ah..

I don't care about cookies

• Obsolete to uBlock Origin filter lists which also has several filter lists with cookies, plus you can add the https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/abp/ if you still think you need more, but they are most likely overlapping.

Bypass Paywalls Clean

• Also obsolete to uBlock Origin in many cases, but since uBlock API is limited there can be cornercases where an extension is needed, although I'd recommend against it.

Consent-O-Matic

• Obsolete to uBlock Origin

Cookie AutoDelete

• Builtin in Firefox, see privacy.clearOnShutdown maybe get inspiration from arkenfox settings.

Thank you @RubenKelevra.
2. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywalls-clean/ doesn't exist anymore. Any replacement, please?

There's a way to add a filter to ublock origin: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/liamengland1/miscfilters/master/antipaywall.txt I think you click import at the bottom of the filters tab.

Is a good idea use true in gfx.webrender.software.opengl = true for windows 11? or it is just for linux?

Other optimizations

I want to take this opportunity to mention these threads I found, about other optimizations in firefox

Part 1 - JIT threshold:

https://ra1ahq.blog/en/optimizaciya-proizvoditelnosti-mozilla-firefox

Summary of the conclusion (please read the above post)

Parameter name	Default value	New value
javascript.options.baselinejit.threshold	100	50
javascript.options.ion.threshold	1500	5000
network.buffer.cache.size	32768	65535

Parameter name	Default value	New value
javascript.options.concurrent_multiprocess_gcs.cpu_divisor	4	8

Parameter name	Default value	New value
browser.display.auto_quality_min_font_size	20	0 - 1000

Part 2 - dom.timeout

https://ra1ahq.blog/en/optimizaciya-proizvoditelnosti-mozilla-firefox-chast-2

Summary of the conclusion (please read the above post)

Parameter	Default	New value
dom.timeout.throttling_delay	30000	40
dom.timeout.budget_throttling_max_delay	-1	0

Note

I have no idea if this will work, the publications where they talk about it seem a bit old but well conclusive. So please try it if you are an expert and let me know !