Removing Google Toolbar, Ditching PageRank Tool, and Speeding up Firefox
Posted on April 14th, 2009 by Gabriel HarperGoogle Toolbar has finally outgrown it’s usefulness. After years of using the Firefox add-on, I permanently removed it from all my computers. The PageRank display was my only reason for using the toolbar. Now PageRank isn’t very useful, the toolbar slows down browsing, and I even saved a meager 4.7MB of memory.
It will probably take some time to break the habit of glancing at the toolbar to see a site’s PageRank, but it’s also refreshing to know how much time I’ll save with one less constant distraction. I’m relying on other tools for SEO and traffic analysis now anyway.
Part of the reason behind uninstalling Google toolbar is to speed up Firefox. Since I use the PageRank display feature of the toolbar, it makes a request to the Google toolbar server for every single pageview. I can’t even fathom how many pages I view each day but it’s easily in the thousands.
Since performance was a concern, I decided to check Firefox memory usage in Windows Task Manager before and after the uninstall. Just to keep things as fair as possible, I restarted the browser a few times before and after checking memory usage and uninstalling. Since memory usage fluctuates, I wrote down actual usage every 3-5 seconds, seven times each, then averaged. Here’s the uber data itself:
| Avg. RAM usage with Google toolbar | 53.9M (53,897 K) |
| Avg. RAM usage without Google toolbar | 49.2M (49,166 K) |
| Total RAM saved by removing Google toolbar: | 4.7M |
According to my crude test Firefox is actually using about 4.7MB less memory now that I uninstalled the toolbar. Browsing already feels a bit leaner without all the PageRank queries. The toolbar has a lot of other features, so your situation may be completely different. I’m glad to be free of it, though. I can’t say it’s not comforting to know how much less data I’m sending off to Google as well. 
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July 7th, 2009 at 10:10 am
I tried to give you a digg on this but digg kept timing out and wouldn’t let me. So i might give you a trackback if I can get time to put an entry up today. I have been getting seriously angry at Firefox lately, but hopefully, by uninstalling the “whack-a-mole” AVG toolbar and the Google toolbar, I can inject a few more months on the life expectancy of the browser (before fully switching over to either Chrome, Flock, or back to Opera).
Of the 3 above, which is your favorite, as a FF replacement?
Nice to meet you.
Chris