Firefox Can’t Find the Server? Make Firefox Fly!

Remember the days when you first installed Firefox?  You could finally experience the web as it was meant to be.  Pages seemingly loaded instantaneously.  The browser opened and closed in milliseconds.  Yeah, those were the days, ahhh….  But now, after numerous updates, all of your installed extensions, your 45,000 pages in your history, and just general accumulation of garbage from use – Firefox is a slug.  Hell, 20% of the time you see “Firefox Error:  Can’t Find Server” when clicking from the Google search results.  Then you need to hit reload 2-3 times before the page finally loads.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Firefox – you probably do too.  The thought of living without all those powerful and highly supported plugins/extensions actually scares me.  All I’m asking is:  where did my fast and furious Firefox go?

The Firefox we all knew and loved did not go out with a bang or with one patch.  Instead, we all slowly and deliberately killed it with one new bit of information at a time.  Firefox can handle those bits, but the way you and I surf and work has created an entangled mess of data that takes Firefox seconds to sort out.  Those seconds can cause communication delays, followed by packet loss which leads to “Cannot Find Server” errors.

So what can you do to bring the speedy Firefox back to life?  The solution is fairly quick:

(Guide is for Windows XP or newer)

1. Download IniFox_en.zip (contains a .bat file and sqlite3).
2. Extract the file somewhere you can find it.
3. Make sure Firefox is closed.  Then place both files, inifox.bat and sqlite3.exe in your Firefox profile folder.  To find your Firefox profile:   Start –> Run –> “%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\”  (exclude the quotes)
4. You should see a folder called something like “6tiqwopx.default”  (yours will be different).  Open that file, it’s your profile.  Place both inifox.bat and sqlite3.exe in your profile folder.
5. Again, be sure Firefox is closed.  Now double click the inifox.bat file.

Done!  Restart Firefox and enjoy a return to the good ‘ole days of near instantaneous surfing.  Anytime you feel Firefox is bogging down, just open your Firefox profile folder and repeat step 5.

What did you just do?  For those that care:  you have used sqlite3 to run the instructions in inifox.bat which optimize your various Firefox databases.  Now Firefox can sort through your tangled mess of data in milliseconds.  This should dramatically speed up your surfing experience, in addition – the “can’t find server” message should be a relic from your past…unless of course the site is actually down.

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