Sillyfox

I am a big fan of firefox. I feel guilty when surfing the web without it. How could you feel safe using IE6 with service pack n? I am sick of this piece of software, recalling my obnoxious experience installing Windows2000 or XP, forgetting to install firewall before doing windows update. Guess what? My box was infected with numerous worms; take a look at “netstat” output, an infinite list of ip addresses, looking for opening ports, propagating itself, terrible. The outcome is a re-installing, insane.

So, back to my topic, my box has 512MB of RAM, which I think it’s pretty enough but after installed firefox, this is not true. It constantly eats up to 100MB+ of RAM, I love firefox however this is simply unacceptable if you compare it with Opera. I came across some pages about optimizing firefox, by either disabling the memory cache (not disk cache) or assign it with a smaller number. The default of this value is depending on the size of your RAM, about 21MB in my case. I changed it to 4MB, nothing happen, changed it to 64MB, nothing happen! The final resort is disabling the entire memory cache, however, this doesn’t help either. Minimizing the window doesn’t help. Conclusion: close the program and reload it.

We have solved our first problem, the second concerning about the default google search bar. I have discovered the URL, after hitting enter to start a search, has a string

sourceid=firefox

in it (try it now), this is the case of both 0.93 and 1.0. In order to remove it, or customizing your search options, go to

C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins

, look for the

google.src

file. Remove the line

<input name="sourceid" value="firefox">

, or change it to

<!-- <input name="sourceid" value="firefox">-- >

. It works! Don’t modify the

browser.search.defaulturl

in

about:config

, it’s a scam!

You can also add

<input name="num" value="50">

to increase your search items per page to 50, or any number you want, try 100000000.