Hacker News Reader

Comment by nchelluri | Hacker News Reader

For Firefox users, I recently did the following: follow the instructions here http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=8494865&sid=37... and run SpeedyFox, which on Mac is I think just a SQLite cleanup tool.

But, it made a huge difference. Deleting all of my history older than six months pegged one of my CPUs and made FF unusable for about 20 minutes, but that, deleting all my cookies, clearing the recent download list, removing a couple of rarely/never used addons, and running SpeedyFox seems to have helped a lot. So speedy now.

View on HN

Firefox has it's own built in cleanup tool. I used it recently when I was seeing odd behaviour and delays loading pages.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a...

This just resets the profile. I've seen the Chrome clean up tool in action on an infected computer and it did a lot more, it actually worked like an antimalware scanner and removed many malware infections from the machine that were doing DNS hijacking and script injection.

Not sure if it's equivalent but bleachbit (a portable ccleaner like tool in python) has rules to VACUUM browsers sqlite files.

`bleachbit -c {chromium,firefox}.vacuum`

I gotta try this. Just last night I was doing some light browsing while hanging on irc and I think my Firefox crashed twice. I haven't had issues since I moved back to Firefox few months back and it started to shake my "commitment"

You can just create a new profile folder.

This is true, but it always takes me a long time to get my setup just right: bookmarks, search keywords, extensions, preferences, getting the address bar history primed...

Isn't there a way to copy a profile?

This would be great for archival - so I can search - I want to know last year when I was on Project X about some things that would be useful right now....

pretty sure the Rescue Profile thing or Reset Profile mentioned above makes a backup copy and puts it on your desktop. Its in the usual profile dir for your OS either way, ~/Library/<something> on OS X and wow it's been forever since I used windows but under your user dir.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com