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Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Clearing History Speeds Firefox Browser Performance?

...or, Read Much?

A quick tech note: I use Firefox's address bar autocomplete feature a lot—start typing a URL, and Firefox presents a list of previously visited sites whose URLs contain that text. I like it better than Bookmarks. But I noticed that feature's response time was slowing down, as was the general speed of the browser. In an effort to speed performance, I cleared out my Firefox browser history yesterday. It appears to have helped, although I might just be suffering the same bias as when I was little and thought new shoes made me run faster.

I last cleared my browsing history in August. Yesterday my history contained over 26,000 unique URLs. That's almost 220 URLs a day, not counting repeat visits (NY Times, KELO, Mundt Library, South Dakota Legislature, YouTube, BarackObama.com,...). If each URL were a page in a book, I've been reading (or at least browsing) a book a day. Uff da!

3 comments:

  1. Hey, they did make you run faster. Mind over matter.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Cory, you and I are at opposite ends of the spectrum here.

    I set Firefox to clear out all browsing data every time it's closed.

    No noose is good noose.

    Try Google Chrome, just for fun. It's fast.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Google Chrome... well, I'm quite happy with their blogging software; maybe I'll have to try their browser. Christmas brings some free time for software experimentation... we'll see!

    "No noose is good noose" -- some readers might cry "to the gallows" with you. I, however, enjoy the punishment.

    ReplyDelete

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