Custom Firefox Builds

Posted on September 3, 2007 2 Comments

With a nudge from a comment by Paul, I went searching for customized Firefox builds this afternoon. I wanted to see if I couldn’t speed up Firefox on my old Thinkpad 600e a bit.

It didn’t take too long before I found mmoy’s Windows Builds page — and there’s even a build for the old Pentium II’s and MMX. Heady stuff. The goal is to figure out what CPU you have and the extensions it supports (cpu-z is handy for that) and then pick a build of Firefox optimized for that CPU.

Seems simple enough. Find the build you want in the list, download it and run the self-extracting archive. In the resulting “Firefox Community Edition” folder is a new firefox.exe program, ready to go. When I run it, it asks if I want “bon echo” to be my default browser, so I know I’m running the new stuff.

However, when I run about:buildconfig, I see the same stuff as all my other systems. I might need to find TFM to R and see if I’m missing something obvious here. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t completely grok firefox profiles…

I’ve yet to grab a stopwatch, but it does feel a bit faster for what that’s worth.

Tags: 600e, browsers, cpu-z, firefox, performance