Filed under: Internet, Security, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Productivity, Mozilla, Freeware, Browser Tips, Web
Firefox slow? Limit history size for speed improvement
by Jason Clarke Mar 31st 2009 at 11:00AM
My beloved Firefox seems to have gotten kind of bloated and slow lately, particularly when starting it up. If you've experienced a similar decrease in Firefox's startup performance, check out this quick tip from Mac Tricks and Tips. One of Firefox's default settings is to remember 90 days of history. This means that Firefox is maintaining a list of every site you've visited along with the date and time of the visit for every day from the last three months. If you're anything like me, this can be a pretty huge list.
The tip is to simply go into the Privacy tab of your Firefox preferences and lower the history setting from 90 days to something much smaller, like 5 days. To realize immediate gains, ensure your Clear Private Data settings are set to clear history, then have at it. It may take a few moments, but once your history is cleared, Firefox should start to feel like its sprightly self again.
While the tip originated at a site focusing on Macs, there's no reason to think it wouldn't also help when running Firefox on Windows or Linux.
[via Lifehacker]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Tatsuyame said 11:38AM on 3-31-2009
As I mentioned in the LH post, I have FF set to clear ALL personal data when it closes. I also happen to close FF all the time (I never leave it open just for the sake of having it open, it only takes a second or two to open again)
As a substitute for history I bookmark a lot. (over 5000 as of this moment)
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KeegdnaB said 12:23PM on 3-31-2009
I feel stupid for not thinking of this before, but I'm happy that I have now.
Huzzahs are in order
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purplecomet84 said 12:58PM on 3-31-2009
I have mine set to clear every time I close and set to keep nothing in history but after a reboot of my computer, the first opening of Firefox still takes close to 2 minutes. I've seen the same gripe a lot in the Mozilla forums via Google search, but when I click through they've been mysteriously deleted. I'm starting to really wonder what's happening with Firefox. In the meantime I've tried out Chrome and liked some of it's features, it's just missing a few of the extensions I really love. If you guys have some tips to speed up the first opening of FF after reboot, I'd love to hear.
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Tatsuyame said 2:50PM on 3-31-2009
I've heard a lot of people gripe about start up times, and making a new profile seems to work. I've never had an issue though, so I'm not sure what they're really complaining about.
thesmilkman said 1:11PM on 3-31-2009
I don't think that will help all that much since that's just the absolute least amount of days it can store. It usually stores the history for many more days than the minimum. You would need to go into the about:config settings to really tweak it to record the history for fewer days.
In about:config, you would want to reduce the values for these entries to something lower:
browser.history_expire_days
browser.history_expire_days.mirror
They determine how many days it can store the history for at maximum. I have it set to 14 days.
Another entry that you may want to tone down is:
browser.history_expire_sites
This entry dictates how many sites to store in the history. The default is 40,000 which I've lowered to 5000.
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Kevin said 7:52PM on 3-31-2009
Thanks for that tip. I'll see how it goes.
Lately I've been having sound distortion throughout the whole computer after a few hours of using Firefox. I thought it was a flash problem, so I installed FlashBlock, but still am getting the same problem. I notice it's when javascript loads on heavier pages, so that's most likely the culprit. I really don't want to have to use NoScript, since I'd have to make a ton of exceptions for many sites I use anyway.
Maybe limiting history will help. I doubt it, but I'll try anything. Sick of having to restart once or twice a day on a dual core machine with 3GB.
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rcarm said 12:17AM on 4-01-2009
I have mine set to 999 days.
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kojo87 said 2:33AM on 4-01-2009
ok now tell me why Firefox hangs for about 2 minutes the first time i start it after booting up. sometimes i have to kill it and reset it. its really frickin annoying. its the only program i have issues with. it also happens to be the program i use the most.
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netdude said 10:22PM on 5-29-2009
same here bud... i hate firefox and will probably switch over to the evil ie8 soon. firefox on windows 7 takes a minute to load now!