I have my " Search Result Previews" addon that shows page thumbnails in the google search results page.
The thumbnails it shows are created on my “mini PC” (before it was Rasberry Pi) in a Virtualbox in Linux Mint using Firefox.
Although it’s pretty fast already (the profile folder is in ramdisk), the CPU is utilized a lot and I’ve noticed a lot of “common” resources is downloaded all the time, like some static google fonts that so many pages use:
And since Firefox is so cool and configurable, I’m sure I’m missing out some easy performance upgrades I could activate.
For example:
- increase cache? Or cache items? Or both?
- disable or enable history?
- build Firefox locally with some special flags?
- maybe I can cache popular resources myself? I have private “reloader” addon that controls the whole process so it can do anything, for example intercept requests and cache them with the Cache API or IndexedDB?
I did run few experiments in the past, but it’s super time consuming to try anything and then monitor if it’s faster or not (especially in the “longer run”, after loading thousands of pages, for example each worker will load about 3,500 pages every day).