Initially Firefox was fast; since I downloaded 3.6.12 loading webpages takes more time and this is frustrating. What do I do to gain back the speed?

Question

Firefox can take up to a minute to load my web page, sometimes longer. Sometimes I have to go back and reload to get to my destination. I have a clean, debugged, reasonably fast computer. Connectivity is not a problem. However, since loading 3.6.12 the speed is considerably slowed. When this happened before, I went back to Explorer because the speed does not slow with that search engine. I would like to stay with Firefox. What can I do or check?

Answer 1

Firefox is comparable to other browsers in terms of time except in startup. It took 60 seconds before I saw Firefox reappear and another 12 seconds to see this tab among my 12 tabs that were open. I used "[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/restartless-restart/ Restartless Restart]" extension to close and restart Firefox. My laptop is a single core machine purchased Jan 2010.
I know I could improve the my startup time by changing the options on one of my extensions, Infolister, or more if I [http://dmcritchie.mvps.org/firefox/infolister_listing_fx4.htm#extensions disabled all 78] of my enabled extensions then it would be a faster browser but wouldn't do much for me.
One of the things that was found was that all of those fonts that we have available slows down the start-up of Firefox. I don't know if we see any improvements in Firefox 4 or 5 based on that yet though.
If you install really large extensions on your machine, and it is difficult to see how large an extension is if it is not at addons, then you are going to have lots of problems. You always want to be aware of what is listed in [http://kb.mozillazine.org/Problematic_extensions Problematic extensions] and why it was listed to know if it applies to you.
At least your time seems comparable to mine. Often when I see someone "complaining" about their time, it looks more like bragging about how fast their machine is.