Filed under: Utilities, Freeware, Browser Tips, Troubleshooting, Browsers
Vacuum Places Improved Firefox add-on speeds up Firefox
I have a love/hate relationship with Firefox. I love the functionality it gives me, but I hate how over time it slows down and acts like a bloated pig. Two of the biggest factors that will make Firefox drag are the amount of history it maintains, and defragmentation of the Places database. We've already told you how to fix both of those issues, but it turns out that there is now an extension that takes the place of pasting a command into the error console in Firefox to vacuum the Places database and remove any fragmentation.
Vacuum Places Improved is a very simple Firefox extension that adds a small vacuum cleaner icon to your status bar in Firefox. When clicked, it vacuums your Places database, just like the command that Lee described in his post in August, but with a single click of the mouse. In my case, the results were remarkable - starting Firefox went from taking about a minute and a half to about ten seconds.
[via Lifehacker]
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The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Leszek Pawlowicz said 3:33PM on 9-16-2009
This trashed all of my Google Reader subscriptions!!! Avoid.
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antboy said 4:06PM on 9-16-2009
It doesn't work on this browser:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3
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Saint Seminole said 5:39PM on 9-16-2009
I can't see how this add-on would have any control of your Google Reader subscriptions... But who knows.
It worked just fine for me... On Windows XP with Firefox 3.5.3.
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kingabraham3 said 6:08PM on 9-16-2009
a minute and a half?! that must be an ancient computer
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minibar said 7:40PM on 9-16-2009
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/08/24/speed-up-firefox-by-cleaning-out-your-sqlite-databases/
(comment 9)
with 25 addons i'm stable.
having the firefox subsystems (history, bookmarks, etc.) run as databases is supposed to be quite fast. both my pcs are dated and the slowest i've had firefox 3.5 start (from idle, no updates) is about 20s. i noticed the places database shrank 25% after running this addon, but i haven't seen any performance improvement. ymmv.
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bridawg said 5:43AM on 9-17-2009
Installed it and had a similar startup improvement - might actually go back to Firefox from Chrome now. Problem is my Firefox updated and the extensions' apparently not compatible with 3.0.13
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