My Firefox on Mac was getting pretty lethargic — almost a minute to spin up, and multiple seconds to just open a new tab. I installed the new beta of Google Chrome, and remembered how nice a speedy browser was.

Google Chrome for Mac is a nice first effort, but without custom search engines, and all the other firefox add-ons, the shininess gets pretty tarnished. I needed my fast firefox back!

I made just a couple changes, though, and my Firefox is back to it’s prior speedy self!

Disable site verification

The first step is easy (but it should only be done with caution): Go to Firefox > Preferences > Security, and disable Block reported attack sites and Block reported web forgeries.

Do this at your own risk. If you’re already using OpenDNS, you’re already have some security from badware (and it’s works everywhere, not just with firefox).

Put your databases on a diet

The other slowdown I found was due to firefox’s internal databases getting fragmented.

First, if you don’t want or need your prior browser history, select Tools… > Clear Recent History… and delete what you can.

Then vacuum the databases. There are two ways to do this — you can use the Vacuum Places firefox add-on (which only vacuums the places db), or you can do it by hand, and vacuum all the databases.

To vacuum manually, first install macports, shut down firefox, and run this script:

sudo port install sqlite3
cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/*
for i in *sqlite ; do sqlite3 $i "VACUUM;" ; done

Vacuuming defragments and re-indexes the internal firefox databases. If you deleted history entries, this will shrink those databases dramatically, reducing the time firefox takes to load those databases in the future.

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