Make Firefox 3.5 start faster on Windows with this simple trick.

With the many advantages of Firefox 3.5 it is worth upgrading to Firefox 3.5. For Windows users there is an open bug that makes Firefox 3.5 to start really slow on certain instances.

Basically, given the way Windows keeps track of history information, once your Windows temporary folders build up Firefox 3.5 takes more time to load than normal.

How do we make Firefox 3.5 start faster? Simple, just clean up these folders.

On Windows Vista or Windows 7 systems,

C:\Users\username\Local Settings\History
C:\Users\username\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
C:\Users\username\My Recent Documents
C:\Users\username\Temp\

On Windows XP,

C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\History
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Recent Documents
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Temp\

Replace “username” on the above path with the actual username of the user logged-in.

You can also setup Firefox to cleanup these folders automatically when exiting. But if you use both Firefox and Internet Explorer then IE might keep those folders bulky and you might want to do the above cleanup anyways.

The other option is to write a batch file to cleanup these folders if you don’t want to do this manually,


del /s /q %TEMP%\*.*
del /s /q %TMP%\*.*
del /s /q %SystemDrive%\temp\*.*
REM del /s /q %SystemDrive%\tmp\*.*
del /s /q %windir%\prefetch\*.*
del /s /q %windir%\Temp\*.*
pause


Just save the above to a .BAT file and execute it at your convenience or schedule it to run at some interval.

I’m sure this bug would be fixed in the near future but in the mean you can use these tricks to speedup Firefox 3.5 to startup faster.