Over time, as I’ve added and removed extensions, it seems that Firefox (which wasn’t all that fast to begin with) has been getting slower and slower. Windows users (myself included) are familiar with the effect, where garbage builds up in the registry, since most uninstallers are far from perfect. What’s the incentive for a software creator to write a good solid //uninstall// program, anyway? Or to debug their uninstall utility beyond the minimum? Perhaps many do (and most software uses generic installer/uninstaller systems, anyway), like the Nullsoft Install System (used by Google), or IntelliShield (you used to see that one a lot), but that doesn’t mean that the software vendor’s configured the (un)installer system properly with the correct list of files and keys to remove, etc. (This is why I maintain that it should be the OS’s responsibility to manage installation and removal of software in an automated way, like a neutral third party, tracking exactly what is added and changed in an installation, so that those same things can be uninstalled completely later. And if it’s one of those “easier said than done” things, it certainly shouldn’t be left to the whim of random software vendors.) Maybe most software uninstalls itself completely, but over an OS’s lifecycle there are plenty of instances where something goes wrong and useless files, registry keys and other junk gets left around. Same thing with Firefox. A clean profile, like a clean Windows install, is lean and fast. But if I take my existing profile and uninstall all of the extensions, I still get those odd half-second-long freeze-ups every 10 seconds or so (despite having disabled session/crash protection and history), and creating a new tab with Ctrl+T induces a several-second freeze, and so on. Tolerable, but could be better.

Just like the Windows registry problem, when I type “about:config” into the browser’s location bar, I see tons of preferences listed for extensions which are long gone, but there’s no interface in the browser to remove said preferences from the list. Instead, you can open //prefs.js// in your profile folder, and delete unnecessary items. I got rid of about half the stuff in my //prefs.js// file, and Firefox seems a bit faster, but it’s still freezing every once in a while as I type. Oh well.