SpeedyFox Review: Easily Boost Firefox, Chrome And More In One-Click

SpeedyFox is a free portable software available for both Windows and Mac OS X platforms. The developers of SpeedyFox claims to boost performance of Firefox, Chrome, third-party web browsers built on them and more. SpeedyFox eliminates fragmentation and compresses the databases to optimize applications it supports. Without much adieu, let’s see how this portable application works and if it really live up to its expectations.

SpeedyFox Review

Introduction

In the big world of web browsers, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome are the most popular browsers. They give the best web browsing experience with dazzling browsing speeds. Yet both of them suffers from the problem of getting slower with time. After a certain period, these browsers tend to become unresponsive and slow.

If you are not a computer geek, trying to find the source of the problem can be a daunting task. Some users takes the extreme step of re-installing the browsers. If you haven’t taken that step or took advice from your neighborhood geek, you should definitely try SpeedyFox. This portable genius can save you a lot of time that you may have spent to reset the web browser to its default state or removing extensions*.

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*Some browser extensions are responsible for slow browsing experience and quirky performance. Both Mozilla and Google warns users against installing those browser extensions or plugins.

How SpeedyFox Works?

According to the developers, “Firefox (and sometimes its add-ons) uses SQLITE databases to store lots of its settings. By the time the databases grow and Firefox starts working slowly. SpeedyFox compacts those databases without loosing any data. Databases are optimized to run faster and are decreased in size.

Let us elaborate it for you all. Let’s say you are a user of Mozilla Firefox. You installed some Firefox add-ons to enhance your web browsing experience. Firefox uses (SQLite) database to keep custom settings that you made both for the browser and the add-ons. Everything is well and good. So what’s the problem in this?

You will start noticing the problem after some lengthy browsing session using the browser. The database starts growing up. It’s size starts touching the sky. It becomes fragmented and thus makes accessing data from databases slow.

As the size of the database and data fragmentation increases Firefox starts getting slower. Now that you got an idea, what’s wrong. You may have already guessed the solution to this problem.

To speed up browsers that uses the database approach to store data, the basic instinct is to optimize the database. But the task is easier to say than doing.

Majority of people may not know even know about those technical terms. Terms like “optimize”, “defrag” and “compress” a database is alien language for them. So what should a non-technical person approach to rectify the problem?

In the quest to find that answer, we stumbled upon SpeedyFox. It fits well in the requirements. It compresses the databases and defragment it so that the next time Firefox or Chrome tries to read it, it can do it faster. And best of all, it does that without removing any data from the databases. In layman’s term, it does not remove your bookmarks, passwords, and other settings. They are still there safe in the database. Is it worth a shot?

Does SpeedyFox Really Works?

SpeedyFox does not need installation like regular apps. Downloading the file and run it when you need to optimize. Since it is a portable software, you can copy it on your USB flash drive and carry it around. Than if any of your PC or Mac needs optimization, run it from the portable drive.

In the first test, it worked well in defragmenting and compressing the database. It detected the three browsers (Firefox, Chrome and Opera) which we installed in our test machine.

Make sure you close all programs that needs optimization. SpeedyFox will not be able to optimize the selected supported programs if they are running.

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It should take much time to complete the process. After it completes the task, you can see information about the optimized databases. You can save the log of the procedure as text file.

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In our tests we found that the difference in the start time of the optimized programs is not so much noticeable. But all is not lost as the response time improved a little after the database optimize process.

If you are asking yourself how many times you should run SpeedyFox? Predicting the number of times you should optimize your database is not concrete. It varies and depends on your web browsing activity. So, if you are a heavy user, you should try to optimize regularly. If you are someone who is a casual surfer, try using the program every week.

Conclusion

Using SpeedyFox is easy. With its minimal user interface that needs almost no user input, you can easily optimize all the supported softwares.

In our tests we didn’t notice significant improvements in opening the optimized programs. We also didn’t notice “significant” difference accessing database taxing tasks like accessing browser history. You can still use SpeedyFox to defrag the databases. Which is, in our opinion, an important function.

Should You Use SpeedyFox?

Although SpeedyFox doesn’t live up to all the claims made by the developers, you can still use it to keep the databases in shape. SpeedyFox is a portable software that’s free and doesn’t needs installation. So, it doesn’t hurt much to give it a try.

Download SpeedyFox Free Portable Software

You can download SpeedyFox for Windows or Mac OS X from the official webpage here.

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