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Do all these extensions slow down firefox?

By Shilpa K - Apr. 16, 2008

I keep seeing interesting firefox extensions all over the place and have ended up downloading a whole lot of them (which, btw, I never use!).

Over the last few months my firefox performance has really deteriorated. I know there are some memory leak issues on Firefox, but I wanted to make sure that the extensions aren't slowing down my performance.

Do the extensions slow down performance? If so, what is the max. number of extensions I should add?


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  1. By an anonymous user on Apr. 16, 2008

    It all depends on the extensions in play. SEO Quake, for example, will gather information from multiple sources at page load and that will have some bearing on your performance. A del.icio.us extension on the other hand is "passive" and only initiates a transaction when invoked and will not be a factor in performance.


    I, for one, use over 15 extensions and never seem to have an issue. Its still faster than IE with ZERO extensions! :)


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  2. By an anonymous user on Apr. 16, 2008

    I also use over 15 extensions and never have a problem. If you run an extreme number of extensions, you can slow things down some, but this guy ran 100 simultaneously with only some speed loss:


    http://cybernetnews.com/2006/02/26/the-ultimate-firefox-test-installing-...


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  3. By an anonymous user on Apr. 18, 2008

    It really depends on what those extensions are. Some extensions send and receive information from parent sites and this really slows things down. For example, the Alexa plugin is great - it shows you information for each site. But, it requires a round-trip to the Alexa service for each site, so that definitely slows things down.


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  4. By Norm Chow on Apr. 18, 2008

    I uninstalled all my plug-ins and life (and productivity) is a LOT better :)


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  5. By Abhinav Bakshi on Apr. 22, 2008

    Well, Yes! Sometimes it really makes your system or browser slow when you have so many extensions/plugins running at the same time.

    So, its better to uninstall or you can disable the non-usable extensions for the time being & enjoy/use the right ones.


    Ciao

    Abhinav Bakshi


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  6. By Delia Lunsford on Apr. 23, 2008

    I haven't noticed a major difference in performance with the extensions I use but sometimes an extension will crash Firefox. As a web developer I can't live without them though and take the bad with the good.


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  7. By an anonymous user on Jun. 18, 2008

    Its not the extensions, its the memory that firefox soaks up but I think that should be solved in 3.0


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  8. By fuad muhammad on Jul. 26, 2008

    dont use yslow and firebug beta on Firefox 3, it's make your Firefox slow down.


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  9. By an anonymous user on Sep. 19, 2008

    You want to uninstall or plugins as having too many can seriously effect initial loading times of the browser.. otherwise uninstall reinstall.. this vid has some cool info .. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZUN-BwiKXQ

    However to really speed up the whole internet browsing speed you must enable pipelining in about config, not as complex as t seems see here.. http://www.nettechguide.com/how-to-speed-up-firefox-page-loading-times/ .. if you preffer you can use faster fox plugin from mozdev here.. http://fasterfox.mozdev.org


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