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I typically have 8-10 tabs open while working - my local website, mostly programming/poweruser sites like this one, a couple of news sites and 1-2 Youtube videos.

Firefox becomes slower (not painful but sluggish) with more open tabs.
I have Adblock Plus, Firebug, Web Developer Toolbar, delicious.com addon, and SpeedDial installed and enabled.

Speeddial has about 150 links totally, but I guess it only comes into play when I ask to display it. And my 50-75 bookmarks should not be a bother, I reckon.

I have 2GB RAM but no GPU.
Will adding a Graphics card help boost Firefox performance?

Or is there a way to allocate more memory to Firefox or some such performance tweak and fix the issue that way?

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2 Answers

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you do have a GPU, maybe integrated rather than dedicated but a GPU it is nonetheless (or your screen would be black :). just make sure you have the latest drivers installed.

however, the reasons for Firefox being slow are not so much related to the graphics card (although the speed dial page may render faster indeed)

try certain optimzations first, here's a comprehensive Firefox Tweak Guide.

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In that guide one of the suggestions is changing javascript.options.JIT.chrome to true. This might help, but you may also get random weird crashes. – Tyler Jan 5 '10 at 19:28
@Molly, thanks!! Firefox Tweak Guide is a great site. From that site, for those who know the normal tweaking, advanced tweaks/usage starts here: tweakguides.com/Firefox_10.html – user15286 Jan 6 '10 at 7:30
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With RAM as cheap as it is, I'd consider adding more before changing anything else.

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With the majority of users buying laptops and netbooks, it often isn't possible to go beyond 2GB. Additionally, requiring more than 2GB of RAM for web browsing seems quite wasteful and it's mostly Firefox and IE that are to blame so they should be blamed and the problem solved at it's source. – Tomislav Nakic-Alfirevic Jun 20 '10 at 16:44
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