Are you tired of your Mozilla Firefox browser getting slow and in some situations, crashing when you are in the middle of writing an important project? Have you ever observed your surfing getting slower and slower by each passing day?

This is basically because your old speedy Mozilla Firefox browser has been stacked up with unnecessary data, which you might have forgotten to erase from your computer. Unimportant plug-ins, useless extensions and even your browsing data can slow your browser down, or even force it to crash while you are surfing.

This problem can be fixed quite easily, however, most people are not properly aware of the tips they need to adopt, to make their Mozilla Firefox browser, fast again. Moving on, let us talk about some of the major ways, in which you can clear all the access and unnecessary data from your Mozilla Firefox browser, and make it fast and retentive again.

Disable the Plug-ins

The plug-ins in your computer help you in managing the content over the INTERNET, for example, Silverlight, Java, Office and Flash etc. However, there are several plug-ins which you have even used ones and are unnecessarily installed in your computer. These plug-ins can slow down your Mozilla Firefox browser and can even force it to crash, but fortunately, you have way of getting rid of these unimportant plug-ins.

Mozilla Firefox browser users need to understand that these plug-ins can only be disabled, and not uninstalled or removed. However, if a plug-in was installed as a part of an extension, you can uninstall it if you delete the extension as well.

In order to disable the Firefox plug-ins you have, you need to click on the button which says ‘Firefox’ and then click on the option ‘Add-ons’, available in the drop-down menu. A new tab of add-ons will open in front of you. You have to click on the ‘Plug-ins’ option and then click on ‘Disable’ for each plug-in you want to disable from your toolbar and computer.

All the disabled plug-ins are moved at the end of the list of the plug-ins and are greyed out. On top of that, the disable button is exchanged by the ‘Enable’ button, to help you re-enable the plug-in, whenever you want. It is important to know that your surfing will not be affected immensely by disabling any of these plug-ins, except for Flash, as it is used on several websites.

Uninstalling the Plug-ins

As mentioned above, the plug-ins cannot be manually uninstalled from your computer, at least not without some trouble. Each plug-in comes with an uninstallation manual. You can see the ‘Plug-ins Article’ on the Firefox Help Site in order to read the uninstallation details of common plug-ins. There is a way to manually uninstall the plug-in, if the uninstaller program does not work for a plug-in.

Disable the Extensions

It is easy to modify your Mozilla Firefox browser all you want, by adding several extensions, such as extensions which integrate with social pages, or which add special features from other browsers etc. or even extensions which help you in blocking ads and downloading videos. However, the more extensions you download, the slower your browser will get. In order to make your Mozilla Firefox browser fast again, you can easily disable them, so you can enable them back whenever you need to use them again.

To disable extensions, you have to click on the extensions tab from the same ‘Add-on Manager’ mentioned above. Find your specific extension and click on the ‘Disable’ button like before. If you get a ’Restart Now’ option, click on it to properly disable the extension afterwards. The disabled extensions will be greyed out, moved to the end of the list, the disable button will be exchanged with the ‘Enable’ button and the options button will be exchanged with ‘More’.

Removing the Extensions

If you want to remove an extension completely, you can click on the extensions tab in the ‘Add-on Manager’ and click on the remove button. If a restart option pops up, restart your computer to complete the process of removal.

Clearing the Browsing Data

Mozilla Firefox keeps track of all your website browsing history. All this data is stored in the ‘History’ database, which might grow to be a large file. However, there are several ways to clear this database.

Clearing All the Browsing Data

To clear all your browsing history for a certain amount of time, click on the Firefox button, and select History. Further, click on ‘Clear Recent History’ from the drop-down menu. From the pop-up screen, selected the ‘Details’ section and select what you want to clear. Then, click on the time range and select ‘Everything’ to clear all your browser history.

Clearing Browsing Data for a Specific Website

If you do not want to clear browsing history for some websites, you can click on the History option, and click on ’Show All History’ from the drop-down menu. A Library Dialog box will display from which you can select a time frame, which matches with the time you browsed that certain website. You can also ‘Search History’ if the list of websites is long. You can then choose, ‘Forget about This Site’ from the drop-down menu and confirm the confirmation message which appears.

Automatically Clearing Browsing Data

To clear history automatically when Firefox closes, select ‘Options’ from the Firefox drop-down menu. You can select options from both the main menu and the sub-menu. Choose the Privacy tab from the pop-up window and from the ‘Firefox Will’ drop-down menu, select ‘Use custom setting for history’.

In the Additional Settings option, check mark the ‘Clear history when Firefox closes’ box and click on settings. From the settings box, choose the items you need Firefox to clear when it closes. Then, click ‘Ok’ twice for your changes to be accepted

The Final Verdict

Surfing over the INTERNET can be a very time-consuming process in itself. On top of that, if your INTERNET browser is slow, you might find yourself waiting for several pages to load for minutes and minutes. This can be nuisance, especially for multitaskers.

To avoid this, you need to make sure that your Mozilla Firefox browser is free of unnecessary data at all times. The above mentioned list of ways can easily be opted on a regular basis, and through these you can make your Mozilla Firefox browser fats again, for speedy and efficient browsing.

References:

  1. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-slow-how-make-it-faster
  2. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/firefox/fix-problems/slowness-or-hanging