Firefox is veeery sloooow

I installed Ubuntu Mate 18.04 LTS on an HP Compaq 6000 Pro Small Form Factor tower. It has an Intel Core 2 Duo @ 3Ghz and 1.9 GB of Ram. When just Firefox is open, it takes forever to load a webpage. It's a pain when I do banking. How can I increase the speed of Firefox?

you got only 2GB of ram which I think is borderline minimum. Any chance you can add more ram?

I run UM 18.04 on a Core2Duo @ 2.33 GHzbut with 4 GB RAM. I notice no issues. A couple of things to check:

Are you swapping to/from disk? ~$ free -h
look in the USED column on the Swap line.

If not showing swap used, and sufficient free memory, you might verify TEMPORARILY by issuing ~$ sudo swapoff -a
reverse this after testing with ~$ sudo swapon -a

Another possibility: do other uses of the Internet (other browsers) work quickly? You might try a browser with a lighter memory usage than firefox.

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It has one stick of 2 GB and four slots, so yes. Thanks

While it is good thing if one can increase RAM, I just want to point out that I am running UM on virtualbox with 2G memory, without issues. Of course I have swap memory of 1G as well. Could it be issue with OP's version of Firefox itself? May be too many extensions?

The system has 2GB of swap and FF has no extensions installed.

The real questions are: is the swap on a HDD or SSD? and. are you swapping out to disk? If you are swapping when using Firefox, especially to a HDD, that can be the sole reason for the slowness. If you are not swapping, then we need to look elsewhere.

That is the purpose of using the free and swapon/swapoff commands: to determine if there is enough RAM to run temporarily without swap, then actually try running with swapoff. Please understand that the memory manager may very likely swap some pages to disk even if you are not completely out of RAM. If a page is deemed "less important" than using ram for disk buffer, the data may be swapped out.

When you have swapoff, assuming there is enough RAM for temporary operation, you have eliminated that source of slowness as a possibility. But, with 2GB RAM, you may easily run out, and with no swap, the out of memory manager will delete any and all processes to keep the kernel alive. So, swapoff isn't a permanent solution in your case, but a test to eliminate the most likely-sounding cause.

The system has a HDD. When I turn swapoff, the pages still take forever to load.

I still think it's the Ram back my brother has a laptop with 2GB and he is having trouble with a slow browser too.

If it is easy to add RAM, going to 4GB is a good idea regardless, and should not cost much.

It might be useful for confirmation to see what the "free" command is showing about swap and buffers usage. You need that before the swapoff to confirm that there is enough RAM to run. Otherwise, your slowdown with swapoff might be from the OOM killer doing its job.

You might also try a different browser or two. Brave is free for download. There are many others. If other browsers have the same problem, I would be looking at a DNS or other network issue as a possibility.