The Fake Steve Jobs (who is that guy anyway?) made a good point recently about Mozilla managing to gain only a small (15%) share of the market in their 20 years of existence. He pointed this out as a reason for Mozilla to turn tail and allow Safari to make its home in the hearts and minds of the public.

As a loyal Firefox user and general Apple devil’s advocate, I have decided to take this as an opportunity to show you how to soup up your Firefox in ways that Safari cannot yet dream.

Under the Hood

Firefox

We’ve already proved that Firefox is substantially faster than Safari’s new Windows chimera. Now it’s time to take things to the next level, first lets see what we can do about that nasty memory leak. Note, this article gets a bit technical so I will try my best to make it as easy as possible for you to follow.

Type about:config into the address bar, click OK (or hit enter).

Right click, from the menu select “New” then “Integer”.

When the dialog box appears, enter the following string: browser.cache.memory.capacity

You will be treated to yet another dialog box, enter: 16384

Why 16384?

To your computer, which uses a different number system than us mere mortals, this is the exact number that represents 16MBs of RAM. Close all instances of Firefox and restart. Between now and your next reboot you should notice a substantial increase in speed.

While we are hacking around, here are a few more tips to give your Firefox a speed bump.

Enable Pipelining

For broadband users, this will substantially increase the speed that pages load. In order to do it, follow these steps.

Type about:config in the address bar, click OK (or hit Enter).

You will be treated with a screen very similar to this one:

On the line that says “Filter” type: network.http.pipelining

Double click on the variable so that it turns from “false” to “true”.

Finally,

Increase Max Requests

On the line that says “Filter” type: network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Change the variable from “4″ to “8″

Supercharge Firefox

Now that we have made our Firefox leaner and meaner, lets add some functionality to it to make our lives a bit easier.

Add This

This is an all in one bookmarking solution. Install the plugin and you will be able to add any page that you are to scads of social bookmarking websites. Not only that, but the plugin will locate the path to the RSS feed for the page that you are on and allow you to subscribe with a touch of a button. Add this to a widget that tracks bookmarking statistics and you have a social media killer app.

Stumble Upon

What haven’t I said about this wonder of Web 2.0? Install the plugin, sign up for an account, enter your preference information and never be bored again. Stumble Upon gives you a one button solution to any moment of boredom you might have, taking you to a random site within your field of interest every time that you click “stumble”. Stumble Upon also gives you the opportunity to recommend sites to others and has a social network to find other people with similar tastes. Overall, the perfect waste of a work day.

FasterFox

Remember all those complex speed hacks I told you about earlier, what if I told you that there was an extension to help you do them. FasterFox is exactly that, install it and a world of Firefox tweaks is opened for you.

FoxyTunes

The ultimate music plugin, it allows you to control all of your music players from your browser and search for cover art, lyrics, videos and bios of your favorite artist. Install it and take your music to a level somewhat higher than it currently is at, but possibly not “Next” depending on the level at which your music currently resides.

Pick A Theme

Firefox has a wide range of themes that allow you to change everything from a few icons to the entire interface. A good selection of these themes can be found here. Since we are talking about Safari, I thought it would be good to highlight the OSX theme.

Macfox II

macFox

From their page,

macfox II continues offering the clean look of Mac OS X Firefox for your PC – includes Aqua-style UI elements and enhancements. Clean, professional and elegant. Redesigned from the ground up on the Firefox 2.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Well, that’s it. If you have followed allow you should have a faster, stronger, more Mac-like Firefox at your disposal. Now, I suppose there are certainly still reasons to switch to Safari, but most of them hang precariously within Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field.