Firefox on Mac: Slow, slow, slow

Solution 1:

30 minutes to startup means there is something wrong and my first guess would be an extension that does not behave. I would try to disable all extensions and see if it is still slow.

The easiest way to do this is to start Firefox in safe mode. Here is quote from the mozilla support site how you can do this on your Mac:

1. Close down Firefox completely:
   On the menu bar, click the Firefox menu, and select the Quit Firefox menu item.
2. Hold down the Option key, as you start Firefox
3. Firefox should start up with a Firefox Safe Mode dialog.

If that helps you can start in normal mode and disable your extensions one after another until you find the culprit.

If it does not help I would try to start Firefox with a fresh profile:

1. Close Firefox and backup your profile
2. Start Firefox (it will create a fresh profile)
3. Restart Firefox to see if the problem still exists
4. Close Firefox and restore your profile

Backup and restore of the profile is really simple, there is a detailed explanation at mozilla's support site.

Solution 2:

You might be (have been) suffering a really large places.sqlite file (holding your bookmarks and history, which may already have expired). You can compact that:

Quit Firefox, wait until you're sure it's no longer running, and then:

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/*.default/
ls -lh places.*
sqlite3 places.sqlite "vacuum;"
ls -lh places.*

When the cd-command fails, the 3rd line will in fact create a new 1024 byte database file places.sqlite in the current folder. That file is not used by Firefox of course, so may be deleted.

Solution 3:

I had exactly the same problem with Firefox on a MacBook. I had no extensions for Firefox, no specific extra downloads, so that I could not say what was causing the problem by doing a safe mode start up.

I backed up my profile, and removed two files from my profile folder: the places.sqlite, which was like 8Mb then 3Mb after the vacuum command (it did not help by the way), and the urlclassifier.sqlite, which was like 5Mb.

And now, everything works like before. And I did not lose any bookmarks or toolbar bookmarks.

I don't know how Firefox uses these files but perhaps they should be cleaned off from the profile folder once every few months to keep Firefox in good shape.