Swiftweasel and Add-on Collections

I decided to move over to Swiftweasel for the majority of my web browsing needs. The performance boost given by the processor optimizations isn't very big but I'll try anything if it makes my system faster =P (Side Note: I chose Swiftweasel over Swiftfox because it's AUR package was up to date, while Swiftfox was still based on 3.0. They are essentially the same thing.)

After installing, I did a few simple benchmarks to see how big a difference it actually made (beyond the placebo effect). The first thing I did was eye ball the startup (not very scientific, I apologize). But Swiftweasel was noticeably faster (by about a few seconds). And these tests were done with Firefox already Preloaded so it really kicked Firefox's ass.

The net has plenty of rendering test (all times are in seconds).

http://rendertest.com/

Firefox_____	Swiftweasel_____
15.24	15.30
15.40	15.26
15.25	15.26

http://scragz.com/archived/mozilla/test-rendering-time

Firefox_____	Swiftweasel_____
14.97	10.32
14.80	10.61
14.31	10.28

http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/csstest.html

Firefox_____	Swiftweasel_____
0.87	0.40
0.81	0.46
0.81	0.40

While the first test didn't show any improvement at all the other 2 show some small improvements. I doubt there's any real world difference given that these are the timed loads of pages with tons of elements. Most sites won't show any noticeable speed increases with the processor optimizations.

So, switching over. This is the time consuming part. Thankfully Firefox has a few tools that make it easier.

First off, Collections. They let you package all your Add-ons together. Here's my collection. That takes care of my extensions.

For the rest of my "bookmarks, passwords, history, preferences and customizations" there's Weave (an experimental add-on included in my collection). It's like Xmarks (formerly FoxMarks) but better! (Well, it will be) Right now it only supports bookmark, password and history syncing. The rest of your settings you still have to sync by hand. Which isn't too hard if you document all the changes you've made (like I do, I'm S-M-R-T).