Firefox, faster

Well, one part of Firefox will be faster, anyway: The "Awesome Bar" ... or as the rest of us know it, the address bar that takes forever to parse the browsing history when we're looking for something we saw last week but we can't remember exactly where. This is one of the things people complain the most about.

This trick cleans the history database that Firefox 3.X uses to find addresses for the address bar. Documented at Lifehacker and Mozilla Links.

Also helps a lot if you go into the Privacy tab in the Preferences dialog box and change the amount of time Firefox keeps your browsing history. Seven days should be plenty and should be a lot less information for Firefox to keep track of.

• [#]Go to Tools->Error Console.
  [#]Paste the text in this code box into the code entry bar at the top of the error console.

Code:

Components.classes["@mozilla.org/browser/nav-history-service;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsPIPlacesDatabase).DBConnection.executeSimpleSQL("VACUUM");

• 
  [#]Press enter.
  [#]Firefox briefly freezes, then returns to normal. You're done.

 

http://www.google.com/chrome

 

Not yet fully available for my OS — you'd think they'd get that handled given that Google's about to expand the Chrome name to a Linux distribution. Not as many extensions. Not as widely accepted. And it has a problem with memory bloat.

 

Oh, didn't know you were on that.

You're right in that I still come across a non-compatible site every now and again, but since it was built off of Firefox (if I remember correctly), it hasn't happened that much of late.

I love it because all the tabs are separate processes. Far and away the fastest browser I've ever used.

 

I got something that says "uncaught exception: Permission denied to call method Location.toString."

 

You remember incorrectly. Built off Apple's Webkit (the basis for Apple's Safari web browser), which was built off the KHTML software library, which is the basis for the default browser shipped with KDE, which is the Linux desktop environment I use.

Which makes you wonder why the Linux and Mac OS X versions of Google's browser are still "development versions" that Google warns non-developers away from.

But anyway ... that line of code fixes the speed problems with Firefox's so-called Awesome Bar.

 

Update Flash to version 10. That was a Flash 9 bug.

 

I have to put in about 12 requests to get updated, so I'll just stick.

 

Dammit.

 

yes, yes! although the lack of whatever they call the "keep your address and stuff," remains puzzling to me since they invented it.

it sure does scream though.

 

On the Windows side they managed to tap into some undocumented Windows interfaces that Microsoft thought it had successfully hidden from everybody except its Internet Explorer team which IE8 also uses.

 

Updating this ... (yeah, yeah, yeah, LOL. Congrats on your mastery of SportsJournalists.com Fu.)

Some guy wrote a Firefox extension that implements that little piece of SQL code up there, meaning you don't have to go back and dig up this post or the Lifehacker page to remember how to do it. The extension does it automagically, prompts you to do it well before it does it itsownself and gives you a status bar button (looks like a vacuum cleaner) so you can do it as often as necessary.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13878

Five stars. 2muchcoffeeman says check 'em out.