Mac site Mac OS X Hints has a quick and easy tip that will make Firefox start up faster. According to the hint, Firefox stores information about all of your file downloads until you tell Firefox to ditch the data. The author was used to waiting a long time for Firefox to start on his Mac, when he noticed Firefox’s download history window still had information dating back to the first day he installed Firefox. Once he cleaned out that data, Firefox began starting up noticeably faster.
“I clicked the Clean UP button on the Downloads window, and quit Firefox. When I restarted Firefox, it went from a 12+ bounce launch to a three-bounce launch on my iMac G5. The Mac Pro was even more surprising. It’s brand new (one week this Monday), but I had imported info from my Powerbook G4. It went from five or six bounces to one.”
The exact procedure for cleaning out the Firefox downloads window is as follows:
- Click Tools. Up at the top of your screen, next to File, Edit, View, etc…
- Click Downloads.
- The Downloads window appears. Click the Clean Up button in the lower right corner.
The author of this hint describes Firefox on a Mac, and Mac OS X hints itself is obviously a Mac site. When the author says “12+ bounces”, he’s referring to the fact that on a Mac, a program’s icon will bounce up and down until the program finishes starting up. Despite the Mac-centric nature of this tip, it will work on Windows too. Whether or not the performance implications are the same, I cannot say for sure.
