Which, not to put too fine a point on it, but what the hell? I’m running a Web browser here, not an Oracle cluster.
Firefox memory hog fix how to#
All I know is that, once you made the move to Firefox 3, you started to notice the browser getting slower and slower, and hanging more and more and the advice you got on how to fix that kept coming back to suggestions like “ use SQLite’s VACUUM command to remove empty space from your Places database” and “ your Places database is fragmented delete it and start over with a clean one“. I’m not enough of an expert on either Firefox or SQLite’s internals to know which one is really responsible. The culprit, as far as I can tell, is Places - or, more specifically, Places’ SQLite backend. And the hangs tended to pop up when doing something history-related, like clicking the Back button, or typing something into the Awesome Bar. Worse, it was hanging more and more as time went on. From Firefox 3 on, I began to notice that Firefox was hanging, and hanging a lot. Which was great! Until it slowly began to become clear that Places brought with it a bunch of problems of its own.
That opened up a whole new range of feature possibilities, such as Firefox’s Awesome Bar, which also shipped with Firefox 3 the Awesome Bar put your browsing history at your fingertips in a way that the old systems could never have supported. The key shift that Places embodied was that instead of being scattered across multiple poorly-documented data stores, history data (including bookmarks) would now be stored in a single data store, running on the popular embedded database SQLite - which meant that all that data could now be queried in more or less the same way as any other relational database. So for Firefox 3, Mozilla scrapped them both, replacing them with a new, unified system known as “ Places.” Before Firefox 3, bookmarks and history were stored in separate places your bookmark list was stored as an HTML file - an approach that went all the way back to the original Mosaic browser of the early 1990s - and history was stored in a custom database called “ Mork“, whose design was memorably described by Jamie Zawinski in 2004 as “ the single most braindamaged file format that I have ever seen in my nineteen year career.”Īs Zawinski’s testimony should make clear, working with those old tools was painful for the programmers involved, and as the browser grew in complexity the limitations they imposed became more and more acute. The culprit, I believe, is the mechanism that modern versions of Firefox use to keep track of your bookmarks and browsing history. And it’s been this way ever since Firefox 3 launched - three years ago. It’s busted so bad that it’s painful to use. So I don’t like that I have to write this post, but I calls ’em like I sees ’em.Īnd on the subject of Firefox as it exists today, the way I sees ’em is this: Mozilla, you need to fix your damn browser.įirefox, on Linux at least, is busted. That’s back when Bill Clinton was president.
I’ve been on the Mozilla fanboy train since before Firefox even existed - all the way back to the original Mozilla Suite’s Milestone 17 release, the first version after the Netscape exodus I used regularly, which Wikipedia tells me shipped on August 7, 2000. There’s nearly ten years of Mozilla advocacy tucked away in the JWM archives. Longtime Readers of this blog will be aware that I have been a fan of Mozilla for a long time. Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser Already