Firefox 3.5 Slow to Start

Jul 2, 2009

Is anyone else seeing a slow startup issue with Firefox 3.5? I'm talking about the initial load (after turning on your computer, for example). For me, startup times have increased dramatically with 3.5, and I've even tried creating a new profile. On my machine at home, cold startup takes between 30 and 60 seconds. On my laptop, it's between 15 and 30 seconds. Firefox 3.0.11 took on the order of 5 or 10 seconds on both machines.

I've got to believe something is wrong with 3.5. Maybe a 3.5.1 is on the horizon...

Update: According to commenter Dean, cleaning out your temporary directory should help things (and it worked for me). To locate the temp folder, open a command prompt and type echo %TEMP%. For me, the folder was under "Documents and Settings\Jonah\Local Settings\Temp." I cleaned this out using the Disk Cleanup utility (mine was 750 MB in size!) and startup was much faster (10 seconds or so).

Update 2: I've found the requisite bug about this problem on Bugzilla: bug 501605. If I read this correctly, NSS uses files in the temporary folder to seed its random number generator. If you have tons of files, this operation takes a long time (the file scan operation isn't as efficient as it should be). There may also be other factors (as commenters in the bug report suggest), but this is at least one of the problem areas.

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14 Comments

rico001

6:28 PM on Jul 2, 2009
No, but I upgraded from 3.11 without reinstalling.

kip

9:19 PM on Jul 2, 2009
Yes, I just had to restart my work PC and noticed the same thing--Firefox took something like 2 minutes to load! it was more like 30 seconds on 3.0. (granted, most of that slowdown is because my PC is still starting services and stuff just after booting. but it was still noticeably slower for me with 3.5.)

Gary

9:49 PM on Jul 2, 2009
I don't have that problem on Ubuntu Jaunty. I just rebooted my ancient Dell D800 with an 1.7GHz Pentium M processor from about 2003. It took 11 seconds from clicking on the icon to start FF for my home page to be fully displayed. So there may be a problem on windows but I don't see it in the Linux version.

John P

3:48 PM on Jul 3, 2009
Firefox 3.5 is definitely a lot slower starting when first run after boot. I am considering going back to previous version if this cannot be fixed

Gary

7:58 PM on Jul 3, 2009
The problem cannot simply be FF3.5 on windows. I just tried FF3 on a Sun VirtualBox running XP on top of Ubuntu on my ancient Dell D800 laptop. FF3.5 starts in about 11 seconds just like FF3 did. This is after a reboot.

Jonah

8:05 PM on Jul 3, 2009
Hmm. So it works in a Windows VM image on Linux just fine. Interesting. I created a new profile on my laptop, and it still takes between 30 and 60 seconds (it's actually gotten longer) to start on a cold boot. I, too, may go back to 3.0.11, seeing as that worked just fine.

Dean

3:41 AM on Jul 4, 2009
I read on another website that it is scanning the temp folder and if you clean it out it will load a lot faster. Haven't tested it yet. To find the temp folder on windows, click start-run then type eplorer %temp%

Jonah

12:29 PM on Jul 4, 2009
That's an interesting suggestion, Dean. I happened to clean out that folder yesterday, and this morning my startup was way faster! There may be something to this...

davef

6:41 PM on Jul 4, 2009
I uninstalled 3.5 due to the very slow load and switched to Google Chrome. I tried to get back to Firefox 3.0 but was unable to do so.

EDR

3:34 AM on Jul 6, 2009
Same problem with Win XP. I found a copy of Firefox 3.011 and reinstalled that. Problem solved.

FTC

3:02 PM on Jul 6, 2009
I just back-installed 3.0...after several different 3.5 installs...and a series of problems with reloading tabs and slow starts. I didn't know about the clearing history cache...but I can't see how that would be a long-term solution, as the cache will build up again--no? I just saved my 3.0 install in a folder...as I have always done with my ftp downloads.

Twitted by ncgeek

2:18 PM on Jul 9, 2009
[...] This post was Twitted by ncgeek [...]

Apex

2:33 AM on Sep 6, 2009
My observation Firefox 3.5 load time pre-clean of TEMP folder: 45 secs. Firefox 3.5 load time post-clean of TEMP folder: 5 secs. Problem solved here ;) Just need the Mozilla team to basically add a "empty TEMP folder on exit" instruction into the code as its already in the OPTIONS gui.

Techexpert

5:34 PM on Jul 15, 2010
you can refer the following link which helped me to make my Firefox browaser faster

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