How in the Tech

Purge that history to speed up Firefox

By Adam Myers ⋅ July 20, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Firefox

Firefox is generally regarded as a fast and efficient browser; mind you not the fastest or the most efficient, but more than acceptable by the masses. However there are a few times throughout a session that seems to cause the browser to stutter and stall. One situation centers around the Awesome Bar – the address bar that had expanded in functionality for the Firefox 3.0 release. As you begin typing in the address field, Firefox begins diligently searching your bookmarks and browsing history for results that match your typed criteria, in real time, as you continue typing. To some, this may not sound like a very useful feature, but generally I find it a great addition.

The problem is, Firefox by default maintains quite a vast browsing history that at times, causes the entire browser to hang as it tries to perform it’s real time search. How vast? Firefox will save websites for a minimum of 90 days to a maximum of 180 days or 4000o websites. Think about that for a second – is there much value in keeping that much historical data around? Are you visiting websites from 85 days ago?

Well, I don’t need all that cruft and rather than accumulate 100′s of megabytes into Firefox’s SQLite database so here is how you tune the ‘Fox down to something a bit more reasonable as well as get a nice speed bump on actions that may hit the internal database.

1. You may already be saying to yourself that I already know how to adjust the Firefox history in it’s options. You may be correct but actually only a portion of the settings are presented in the user interface. For the rest of them, you must dig into about:config through the address bar entry.



2. Filter the myriad of options for just ones relating to browser.history.



3. To speed up Firefox change the values for
   • browser.history_expire_days: the max number of days websites stored in the database from the default of 180 to something more reasonable.
   • browser.history_expire_days_min: the min number of days websites stored in the database from the default of 90 to something, again, more reasonable.
   • browser.history_expire_sites: the max number of websites  stored in history from the default of 40000.
4. Restart Firefox to apply your changes.