firefox history

[gw]

Last time I installed firefox I set the history to a year and about 10 months later that function has slowed to a crawl. There is something wrong with the database being used in there.

[Randall]

Last time I installed firefox I set the history to a year and about 10 months later that function has slowed to a crawl. There is something wrong with the database being used in there. That's a well known problem, I believe. History.dat is little more than a text file.

Firefox 3 uses SQLite, so in theory it should scale better. I'm pretty sure 2.0 still uses the history.dat file.

Randall

[kitchin]

Wow, history in FF3 beta is really bad! I thought it was slow in FF2. Clicking "History" in the menu in FF2 is about a five second delay for me, the first time after browser start. Then after that it is fine. FF2 uses the old "Mork" text format, which the developers decided was crufty and hard for them to understand. So they switched to SQLite for FF3, and wow is it slow. Even the UI is bad:

There are two "History" menu items! One is "History/Show All History...", the other is "View/Sidebar/History." The first is truly hopeless. I click it and wait actually 3 to 5 minutes. WinXP CPU usage by Firefox goes to 95% and above and the whole computer slows down, and the browser is frozen. Finally a window with my history pops up, and it is not very well designed. Most columns are missing, such as "last visited," and after you add, them, it doesn't remember that next time. Etc. Close the window, click "History/Show All History..." again, and the same thing happens! Over 3 minutes! My history is 90 days, above default, and my history.dat is 15MB, place.sqlite is just over 7MB, not too bad. I tested with FF3beta1, beta2rc, and the nightly, with fresh profiles, except for history.dat.

"View/Sidebar/History" on the other hand, which is not obvious to find, three levels deep in the menu, works fine for me in FF3. But most of the history performance bugs I saw that are due to be fixed before release are about the sidebar. Those problems must be reported by people with really big histories.

Both history UI's in FF3, sidebar and window, are poorly designed but I won't go into details.

[Randall]

There are two "History" menu items! One is "History/Show All History...", the other is "View/Sidebar/History." That's nothing new -- there's a "View > Sidebar > History" in FF 2 if not earlier. It's consistent with the Bookmarks sidebar vs "Boomarks > Organize Bookmarks," if you think about it.

I have the history turned off completely in Firefox 3 -- I think I'll keep it that way for now. :hrmm:

So much for scalability ...

Randall

[Randall]

Just upgraded to beta 2. Still keeping the history turned off...

Well, maybe I'll set it to 1 day.

Randall

[kitchin]

D'oh you're right about the menus. Except FF2 has History/Show in Sidebar. That one is missing from FF3, which I find highly illogical, Capt. Kirk.