Developpers should know this assumption : software users are hard to please, really, and so are Linux one. Firefox, with all its qualities and its main role in the browser war is not an exception to this rules and is regulary attacked by the community itself. These criticisms are essentially targeted toward Firefox performance. The new upcomers onto the browser market (Webkit and Chromium) and several announcements about their rendering engine performance only gets criticisms harder.
From my point of view, I must admit that the more Firefox evolves, the more it becomes slower and heavier to use. But rendering engine does not explain everything : Firefox and Epiphany comparison, both based on the same Gecko rendering engine, is clearly at the later advantage in term of performance. User experience performance is not only a rendering engine fact.
You'll find here and there lot of tutorials explaining how to improve Firefox network performance. It surely helps, but I think the most critical issues about user navigation experience is all about SQLite engine.
Actually, since its version 3, SQLite is massively used for internal data handling (cookies, history, etc). But as lot of DBMS, SQLite also requires some maintenance tasks to keep its performance ahead.
All is about feeling :
- Firefox takes more and more time to start
- contextual search in the Awesome bar is dawn slow
From that moment, purging SQLite databases will certainly help. VACUM command will be used to proceed. SQLite perforamance FAQ describes this use case.
SQLite command line is required to launch the maintenance task. You have to install it first using :
$ sudo aptitude install sqlite3
Then launch, ffast.sh (I'm not the author) as standard user. Firefox has to be closed before. For the most part, this script seeks all .sqlite files in your Firefox profiles and then launch the VACUM command.
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