Iceweasel is terribly slooooow... Any new ideas?

[Imagus]

Does anyone have any idea why Iceweasel 3.5.16 is sooooo slooow? Really, it seems to get worse every day. Yes, I have already searched the forums and tried some of the about:config tweaks, but they don't seem to do anything. I also increased my cache size to 250 Mb (even though I don't know if that's necessary because I'm always running in private mode), but nothing seems to help. Opera is much faster, but I really like Iceweasel and would like to keep it.

Does anyone know what exactly is causing this sluggishness? Will it ever get better or will it only get worse with every new release?

Thanks for any insights.

[rivenathos]

The only consistent tweak I have found to make a difference for me is to disable IPv6 in about:config. Though, you probably did that first thing.

Now, if you are running in private mode, nothing is being cached, so you are having to download everything all the time. That will make a difference.

[nadir]

Try this:
http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/configur ... e-bearable

I never had the problem that iceweasel would be slow, but i know that a lot of people say it
(so it must be that way for some people. Why i don't know)

[sgosnell]

I'm not sure what to tell you. I'm running Iceweasel pretty much vanilla, with several add-ons, and it's not slow for me. Running in private mode will slow it down, I think, as will IPv6, but otherwise I've seen no problems. Pages load about as fast as can be expected based on my internet connection speed. At work, where we barely have a usable DSL connection, and several computers connected, it's obviously slower than at home with a good connection and no other computers, but all that is expected. On my home network, pages load almost immediately.

One thing I've done is replace the DNS lookup with OpenDNS, and uncheck the boxes for requiring IPv4 and IPv6 to complete the connection. I'm not sure how much that helps, but using OpenDNS seems to make page loading snappier.

[tacoz]

I know this is not a solution to your problem...
but I dropped using Firefox for the very same reasons that you described... 'cos I wasn't getting much joy from the proposed solutions to said issues.
I currently use the default Gnome's Web Browser (listed as Epiphany Browser) and I haven't looked back...

[Imagus]

@rivenathos: I checked the ipv6 setting and noticed it was already disabled. I will also try to switch off the private mode (it isn't very important anyway) and see if that helps. I always assumed that caching stuff in memory would be faster than caching everything on the disk, but apparently this is not the case.

@nadir: I tried all of the settings on that page, and there really is some improvement at last! (I don't know which one did the trick, because I tried them all at once). The browser is still not as fast as I would like, but at least it's faster than before.

@sgosnell: Using OpenDNS sounds interesting too, thanks for the tip.

@tacoz: I know... I would gladly use Epiphany or some other browser (except that piece of spyware called Chrome), but I just can't live without Adblock, Flashblock, Noscript, OptimizeGoogle and all the rest of the useful add-ons.

Anyway, thank you for the tips (@everyone)