Álvaro H. Beckerig

Firefox and its forks (like the beautiful Zen Browser ) offer the best in privacy. However, in day-to-day use, it’s quite noticeable that they fall a bit short in performance compared to browsers based on Google Chrome’s engine (Chromium).

Does privacy come at a high performance cost? Not always — and that’s where the magic of Betterfox comes in.

Tuning Your Firefox

Browsing Reddit forums some time ago, I discovered ways to make Firefox faster and more responsive.

One of the most interesting tactics is using Betterfox — a script designed to make your browsing smoother and more efficient, based on two principles:

1. The Law of Diminishing Returns
2. The Minimum Effective Dose

Below I briefly explain what these concepts mean.

The Law of Diminishing Returns

This law suggests that, after a certain point, each additional effort yields smaller and smaller benefits.

In other words, tweaking every possible Firefox setting doesn’t always bring proportional gains in performance, privacy, or usability — so the ideal is to adjust only what truly matters.

The Minimum Effective Dose

Also known as Minimum Effective Dose, it’s based on the idea that, in many contexts (such as health, fitness, productivity, etc.), there is a minimum amount of effort that already delivers a good result.

More than that can be wasteful or even counterproductive — a truly lean approach!

Betterfox: performance and privacy in the right measure

To provide a faster and more balanced browsing experience, Betterfox contributors follow three core principles:

1. They carefully select which preferences to change;
2. They avoid excessive changes or those with low practical impact;
3. They focus on the balance between performance, privacy, and stability, without technical overkill.

How to Install

To install Betterfox, simply follow the steps below:

1. Visit the repository at https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox
2. Download the user.js file described in step 2 of the repository
3. Open about:support in your Firefox
4. In about:support, find and click “Profile Folder” to open your profile folder
5. Copy the user.js file into this folder
6. Restart the browser by clicking the “Clear Startup Cache” button

GG - Start using your Firefox in turbo mode.

Conclusion

Betterfox follows a lean and strategic approach, changing only the settings that truly make a difference — no overkill, no unnecessary complications.

Benchmarks show that Firefox can become up to 31% faster with Betterfox’s custom settings.

So, have you put your Firefox into turbo mode yet? 🚀

To download the latest version of Firefox:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/