Do Bookmarks slow-down firefox start-up?
I don't believe that bookmarks play a major role in the startup process.
Whatever you do, the startup of FF will be slow, in direct proportion to the number of add-ons. And since one of the best reasons to use FF is its wealth of add-ons, we wouldn't want to change that.
The solution is rather to never really close FF, just to get it out of the way.
I use the extension Minimize To Tray, which minimizes FF into the system tray. That way, it doesn't take valuable taskbar space, and FF is always available with a simple click on the tray icon.
EDIT:
Since FF 3.6, Minimize To Tray is no longer supported.
I use instead MinimizeToTray revived which works perfectly well.
Since Firefox 3.0, Firefox now uses a database (specifically, places.sqlite) to store bookmarks. My guess is that the "delete unused bookmarks" is old information, from when Firefox used to have to read through an html file to retrieve all your bookmarks.
Some of the things you can do to speed up Firefox are:
- "Vacuum" your
places.sqlitedatabase. This can be easily done with the Vacuum Places extension. - Defragment your harddrive
- Clear your cache, cookies, and history in Firefox by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Del and check the applicable options.
The first time I used the Vacuum Places extension, I saw a huge jump in performance, especially from the "AwesomeBar".
I have no experience with it, but there is also a Firefox Preloader program on SourceForge that is supposed to be able to help load Firefox faster. I can't guarantee it will help, though, as the project was last updated in 2005 (although Download Squad wrote about it in 2008, so who knows).
Ccleaner has an option to 'compact databases' for Firefox and Chrome.