Firefox too slow for you?

Speed is a big issue for Firefox. This well-featured browser has a lot of potential, but some people are still not using it because they say it's too slow. Nobody likes to crawl on the Net.

The story behind the why is a bit funny. And complicated. Firefox is actually designed to be fast. One of the ways to speed up a browser is to cache images and files. Caching is the storing of all the files that make up the websites we visit. Cache is a small part of your computer that the browser uses for storage.

Image files are often cached because they're often bigger than most other kinds of file. Caching image files would mean that the browser wouldn't have to download the same image file again and again when it needs to. The browser will get the needed image file from the cache instead. This is the same for other kinds of file, not just image files.

Conceptually, caching would make the browser faster. However, caching also uses up your memory (the RAM). Lots of it, actually.

And this will subsequently slow things down again.

Sounds like a contradiction, right? But like I said, the story is more complicated than that.

If you have a large RAM, maybe 512MB or higher, you'd probably won't experience the slow down. But if have a PC with a small memory, you might want to consider something else.

Like Opera. I love it. Opera is seriously unappreciated. It's fast and very user-friendly. In my humble opinion, it's one of the best designed browser right now (in some ways, even better than Firefox). See for yourself why many people are singing praises about it.

Still can't let go of the fiery Fox? Check out these speed-boosting tips (thanks, mudin!). All the best.

p/s: I use both Firefox and Opera, alternately.