[Tip] Make Mozilla Firefox Faster by Disabling UI Animations

We shared this trick in our exclusive Firefox Nightly Updates topic when Firefox 57.0 was under development and today in this topic we are going to talk about it in details.

As we know the new Firefox version named “Firefox Quantum” comes with brand new Photon UI which provides several UI changes and enhancements. It comes with squared tabs, combined address and search bar, revamped new tab page, redesigned preferences page, etc.

Along with these UI changes, Firefox new version also comes with some new UI animations and effects. You can notice these animation effects in several places. For example, stop/reload button animation, opening/closing tabs, going into full screen mode, download alerts, menus effects, preferences animation, etc.

Following images show these animations in action:

Stop/Reload Button Animation:

Full Screen Mode Animation:

Opening/Closing Tabs Animation:

All these new animations look cool and attractive but sometimes these unnecessary animations might slow down Firefox on slower machines. Don’t worry! You can make your Mozilla Firefox faster by disabling these UI animations.

By default, Mozilla Firefox doesn’t provide any option in Preferences page to turn on/off animations but we can disable these animations using Firefox’s hidden secret advanced configuration “about:config” page.

In older Firefox versions, Mozilla team provided separate preferences in about:config page to disable these animations such as browser.tabs.animate preference to disable tabs animation, browser.fullscreen.animate preference to disable full screen animation, browser.stopReloadAnimation.enabled preference to disable stop/reload button animation, etc.

Now in newer Firefox versions, all preferences have been combined into a single preference. So you can disable almost all kind of animations in Mozilla Firefox at once by changing a single preference in about:config page.

If you also want to remove all UI animations and speed up Mozilla Firefox, check out following steps:

1. Open Mozilla Firefox and type about:config in the addressbar and press Enter. It’ll show you a warning message, click on “I accept the risk!” button.

2. Now type cosmetic in Search filter box and it’ll show following preference in the window:

3. Double-click on toolkit.cosmeticAnimations.enabled preference and it’ll change its value to false. Alternatively, you can right-click on the preference and select Toggle option.

That’s it. It’ll immediately disable all UI animations and you should notice improvements in Firefox performance.

NOTE: You can also disable download notification animation in Firefox using following tutorial:

[Tip] Disable Download Notification Animation in Mozilla Firefox

Also Check:

[Tip] How to Restore Classic UI in Mozilla Firefox (Sort of)