firefox quicklaunch preloader?

[Jeff]

On my new system one thing I noticed is that IE7 loads almost instantly whereas Firefox takes a few seconds to launch.

I found https://sourceforge.net/projects/ffpreloader/ and it works to make firefox instant to start from the lower right firefox preloader icon, but...
-now clicking on windows "Internet" link does nothing (the firefox exe will no longer directly load) which means also that...
-clicking in a link in email, etc. results in nothing happening, as the default browser doesn't load... nothing.
-and the big one... with the firefox preloader installed firefox.exe continues to be loaded in memory to the tune of 153 MB even with firefox closed. I was hoping that the preloader could keep a smaller memory footprint and keep enough of firefox loaded that it would start instantly. At 153 MB I might as well just keep firefox open and minimized, I think...

Anyone else use the firefox preloader from https://sourceforge.net/projects/ffpreloader/ ?

Are there any other better options to make firefox launch as instantly in vista as IE7 does?

[Mandi]

This might be an apples and oranges thing since my only point of reference is XP, not Vista - but I'll comment on how they work for me. I run IE with zero add ons, and do not allow the Phishing filter thingy to bog it down further - but I only use IE once in awhile - for example, if I need side by side different logins to the same domain (logging in FF tabs would force a logout from one usually.)

With zero addons, IE runs at about 40MB of RAM for me. With six addons (not including FasterFox, the FF accelerator addon) Firefox runs at around 34 - 35 MB. I installed Fasterfox just to see if there was an appreciable difference, and yikes - it upped it to 42 MB, and then over 50 when I looked at something browser intensive like Gmail (...all that AJAX code!)

So I don't think Fasterfox is the answer to your problem, unless your new machine is so ripped that bloated apps don't bog it down. (And yay for you if it is . . . give Fasterfox addon a try.)

This begs the question, though - what's the addon count for your installs?

This is pure speculation, just something I'm throwing out and am willing to be flat wrong about :dopey: LOL - but I wonder if Vista perhaps has some optimization for working more seamlessly with IE (...finally?) That could account for a difference observed in Vista, but not XP.

[Jeff]

I do believe vista is doing something so IE loads instantly. This new computer is a lot faster than the old, but on the old firefox was "fast" and IE was "slow". On the new computer firefox is "fast" but IE is now "virtually instant." I also notice that when IE runs with one site loaded (this page) task manager reports a memory footprint of only 26 MB... which makes me suspect that other parts are actually loaded as separate processes or something that stay resident. With firefox I do use fasterfox which really helps browsing on my high latency connection. I suppose the easiest is to just get used to minimizing instead of closing firefox, but I keep closing it out of habit. Not that 3-4 seconds is a ton of time to load, but compared to IE's <1 second load, it seems like a long time!

[Mandi]

Maybe Vista is using Prefetch for IE but not Firefox?

[Jeff]

You would think Firefox would be cached by prefetch/superfetch, but it doesn't seem to be. IE and windows mail, and some other programs are just blazingly instant to launch, but FIrefox isn't, even though it's opened and closed frequently being my primary browser. I don't know how to check or alter prefetch/superfetch yet though...