SpeedyFox: speed up Firefox (seriously!)

In the past week or so SpeedyFox has been featured in articles by many popular and respected tech websites which I read (occasionally). Until now I just gave it a short glance and passed over it. I say “until now” because I finally decided to give it a go; and now I can vouch for all the other websites which wrote about SpeedyFox because SpeedyFox really does speed up Firefox.

What SpeedyFox does is actually quite elementary if you stop and think about it. You see Firefox uses SQLITE databases to store its settings and other important stuff (one database per “profile”). The longer you use Firefox, the more that database grows. SpeedyFox simply compacts that database. Smaller database = faster Firefox = happy Ashraf.

That being said, obviously the speed increase you experience after using SpeedyFox will vary depending on how long you have used the specific Firefox profile you speed up with SpeedyFox. For most of us we have never created custom Firefox profiles so we only have one profile (“default”). In that case the speed increase you experience after using SpeedyFox will depend on how long you have been using Firefox (i.e. when was the last time you formatted or uninstalled/reinstalled Firefox and deleted the settings).

Using SpeedyFox is (almost) as easy as eating pie:

You download SpeedyFox.
You close Firefox if you have it open.
You run SpeedyFox (no installation required):

You select the profile you want to speed up (most of us will only have one profile; in that case leave it at “default”).
You click “Speed Up My Firefox!”.
You wait:

The compacting of the database will depend on how large your database is. According to the developer, it can vary from 5 minutes to an hour.

You enjoy.

While it is hard for me to quantify in numbers the speed increase I am now enjoying, as I said the reason I am writing about SpeedyFox is because it does work.

You can download SpeedyFox from the following link: