Now that the folks at Mozilla have adopted the Chrome mantra of release early, release often, the fanfare around major version releases has greatly subsided. Recently, Firefox reach the 8.0 release but outside of a prompt by your browser to update to the new release you’d be hard pressed to notice any changes unless you really dug in deep.

While Firefox has slowly improved over the years, it’s still a big sluggish to get up and going at launch. The problem is further exacerbated when you have the preference set to reload all the tabs from your last browser session. Typically the disk will grind and RAM usage will spike quickly, with the interface rather unresponsive until everything is loaded and rendered.

Firefox 8 includes a new preference option that previously required an extension to provide – tabs will only load after a relaunch upon their first access. Meaning a fresh launch of Firefox will only render and display the first tab you are viewing; subsequent tabs will be opened but not fully loaded until they are selected. The option seems minor but it greatly improves the user experience for those of us that always seems to have dozens of tabs opened.

Enable the setting under Firefox’s General Options and then check Don’t load tabs until selected option. The trade-off will be losing a few seconds the first time you select each tab after a relaunch – a small sacrifice for many.