<story><title>20-line patch to Firefox 4 that makes startup on Windows 2x as fast</title><url>https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627591</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ot</author><text>Taras Glek&apos;s blog (&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek&lt;/a&gt;) contains a lot more information about link optimizations to improve startup times of Firefox.&lt;p&gt;One of the reasons why loading libxul is so slow normally is that the chain of constructors called at initialization time is arranged &lt;i&gt;backwards&lt;/i&gt; in the library (&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/2010/05/27/startup-backward-constructors/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/2010/05/27/startup-backward-co...&lt;/a&gt;) so the OS (which is usually optimized for forward loading) cannot efficiently prefetch the pages.&lt;p&gt;There is also a post that explains how they measure the startup time on Windows (&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/2010/10/04/diagnosing-slow-startup/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/2010/10/04/diagnosing-slow-sta...&lt;/a&gt;) and Unix (&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/2011/01/14/builtin-startup-measurement/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/2011/01/14/builtin-startup-mea...&lt;/a&gt;).</text></comment>
<story><title>20-line patch to Firefox 4 that makes startup on Windows 2x as fast</title><url>https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627591</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>blago</author><text>After using FF for 5 years it got so slow on my Mac that it became unusable. I made the switch to Chrome last year and I&apos;m not looking back. I was an early adopter and supporter (including money) but FF is no longer what it used to be. The code base is bloated, performance is sluggish, they don&apos;t seem to care about developers anymore (websql anyone, lack of officially supported debugging tool). All of this in spite of cream-of-the-crop tallent that they have acquired in the last few years. I keep asking mysel and just can&apos;t figure: how did it all go so wrong.</text></comment>