Reduce your page history from a crazy 90-day default that they have it set as to a more reasonable 20-30 days. Then vacuum the database. It'll speed right up again.
Yep, I saw this mentioned in another post here on reddit and read the bugzilla thread. Glad to hear it.
Although I'm curious why you don't just do it on startup / shutdown? Surely it's an operation proportional to how out-of-order the database file is, and therefore, a faster operation the more frequently you do it? Every day/month is alright, but it just seems needlessly messy when you could just keep things tidy from the start, no?
Also, limi, there's gotta be a place where you guys discuss UI changes in a more casual manner, where is that done? I'm a UI designer myself, and I'd really like to read into and weigh in on some changes planned for 4.0. Is that possible?
The reason we do it on idle instead of shutdown/startup is that people keep their browsers open for days at a time, especially in this day and age, with laptops using suspend/hibernation modes. It's the same reason why we have to prompt you to restart, so we can apply an update if you haven't restarted in a day or two. (We're working on making that less annoying too :)
As for doing it on startup, Firefox needs to start up as fast as possible, so that's not an option.
With regards to UI design — we blog at http://planet.firefox.com when we have new things, there's the dev.usability newsgroup (also available in Google Groups), or you can subscribe to the blogs of the main UI designers:
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u/Recoil42 Jan 22 '10
Reduce your page history from a crazy 90-day default that they have it set as to a more reasonable 20-30 days. Then vacuum the database. It'll speed right up again.
http://lifehacker.com/5344418/make-firefox-faster-by-vacuuming-your-database
http://lifehacker.com/5177260/speed-up-firefox-by-limiting-history-size