I’m a big fan of Firefox, after all you can see that by reading this blog. I write a lot about it because as I use it regularly, I keep learning new cool things and of course share them with you here.
But lately I have some issues with these newer versions of Firefox, or to be more exact, with Firefox 3 and 3.5 versions. Whenever I start Firefox it seems whole system is slowing down and everything is working pretty slow and sometimes even stops to work. Especially when I type an URL into address bar and then hit ‘enter’.
I really couldn’t stand that (very frustrating isn’t it?) and so after searching for a solution to the problem I found it and fixed it easily. Everything works like a charm now! If you have similar problem with Firefox (slowing down and stopping to work), then here’s what you need to do.
Firefox History Data and Windows History. These two things are big factor that slows down your Firefox.
When you type some URL in Firefox address bar, it tries to get previously visited sites from browser history to suggest you related URLs. If you are a power Internet user and browse a huge number of sites on daily basis, your Firefox actually stores a huge data in browser history. So much data will definitely slow down Firefox as described above.
To fix this problem, you need to delete the cache of your Firefox Browser. But wait, that’s not all! That does not delete the full history because Firefox stores history in a profile folder shared for bookmarks as well. When you clear the cache using Firefox, it only deletes files located in cache folder.
To really delete history of browser, you will have to remove or rename a file named places.sqlite, (it’s better to rename it, so if later you decide to undo the changes, you just rename it again as it was before), below is how to find it but before doing that, make sure you have closed all instances of Firefox browser on your computer which means no running process of Firefox.
You can find file named ‘places.sqlite’ (without quotations) here:
C:Users{your windows username}AppDataRoamingMozillaFirefoxProfilesy5ms34me.default
Note that “AppData” folder is hidden and you need to enable “Show hidden Files and Folders” in Folder Options to be able to see it.
Rename the file places.sqlite to some other name like places.sqlite.bak to recognize it as backup.
Just a few more steps and you’re done:
1. Now start Firefox, and go to ‘Tools’ menu.
2. Click on ‘Options’ under ‘Tools’ and then click on “Privacy” tab. There you can see options related to Firefox history.
3. Select option ‘Use Custom Setting For History’. Now there is a filed that let’s you change the number of days that Firefox saves history for.
4. Change it from 90 to something like 10. Click OK and close the window.
5. Now restart Firefox and…
You can now enjoy much faster response time and get rid of big and frustrating slowdowns!
I have to say it one more time, it’s my favorite word 
Enjoy!