Help Me Fix Firefox

[Smallwheels]

My Firefox is just slow. Compared to Safari it causes the pin-wheel often. I suspected that one cause could be the enormous amount of bookmarks it has. To remedy this I want to remove many of them. Unfortunately Firefox freezes or comes to a creeping halt when I'm on the third one in a row.

Removing the first bookmark goes OK. I open the bookmarks bar and right click to delete the item. The next one goes slower. The third one will just practically freeze the browser controls. I tried dragging and dropping unwanted bookmarks into a single folder so I could just delete all of them at once. That too creates the same slowdown.

Years ago I could save a file of bookmarks into an html page. I don't see that option on the newest version. The tutorials regarding bookmarks on the Mozilla site are outdated, at least when related to OS X 10.5.8.

If I could export the bookmarks to an HTML page I could just quickly delete the ones I don't want and import that file back into the browser. I don't want to visit every bookmark page and click remove bookmark. That would take a long time. I had to do something similar years ago with transferring bookmarks from one computer to another. That was before browsers had export or import features.

There are bookmark transfer programs out there but that wouldn't solve my problem of deleting the ones I don't want.

Does anybody have a solution to making Firefox fast again? I delete the cache several times per day. One thing I did that helped a little is to not receive suggestions when I type things into the address bar.

I don't want to switch to Safari or Chrome because they aren't as good on crossing platforms. I use Linux on one computer and Firefox is best at cross platform bookmark management. It also has more features than Chrome. That is why I prefer it. Xmarks is a bookmark synchronizing program that caused problems between browsers. I don't use it anymore.

Smallwheels

[saul]

Bookmarks - Show all bookmarks

Then there is a star button on the menu that lets you export/import html

[Smallwheels]

Thank you for your help. I usually enter the bookmarks from an icon to the left of the address bar. Your post reminded me that there is another way to see them That is where I did see that export menu choice. I didn't know that after clicking the Show All Bookmarks there would be the little icon to do the exporting and importing.

So I saved the file but can't edit it to remove bookmarks. What program could the file be opened into so I could just begin deleting the files before reloading them by using the import method?


Smallwheels

[saul]

That icon is buried in a stupid place.

You did do an "Export Bookmarks to HTML..."
Then open it with TextEdit for easy deletes. Use another editor like vi if you want details.

[richardtj]

Got the same issue on my Mac Pro- this one:

http://www.forevermac.com/2008/01/apple-mac-pro-eight-core-2-8ghz-xeon-2008-specs/

It's maxed out with 12 gigs ram, 120 gig SSD and Geforce 8800GT video cards. Safari, chrome etc work stable and smooth as silk. Firefox comes to grinding "spinning beachball" halt about 30 minutes after a fresh reboot and restart of the software. Suspect that it's becuase I'm still using 10.5.8 with an unstable version of Firefox. Going to update both later today as I don't have the same issue on my MBP which is running 10.6 with newer version of Firefox.

[macmanmacman]

it's 10 .5.8 that doesn't play well with firefox and i am sorry to say the latest version of firefox is 64 bit and 32 bit for lion and mountain lion i can recommend a alternative though to fix your issues there is one web browser that runs in leopard called camino it runs and is quite fast and easy to use but it doesn't import bookmarks from safari or firefox.

Also look for you view it will help you view youtube videos on any macintosh running leopard or tiger