Chris's Wiki :: blog/web/BrowserHistoryForever Commentshttps://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/BrowserHistoryForever?atomcommentsDWiki2015-05-02T05:14:09ZRecent comments in Chris's Wiki :: blog/web/BrowserHistoryForever.By Chris Siebenmann on /blog/web/BrowserHistoryForevertag:CSpace:blog/web/BrowserHistoryForever:0deb2337a877b74c6e457e56516da42fbf45303dChris Siebenmann<div class="wikitext"><p>I have my values for that preference (and the non-transient version) set
to very large numbers. I forget how I found them; I may have just been
poking around at some point, stumbled over them, and immediately yanked
them up to safely high values to approximate 'infinity'.</p>
</div>2015-05-02T05:14:09ZBy Polygone on /blog/web/BrowserHistoryForevertag:CSpace:blog/web/BrowserHistoryForever:6aa633b7093b04f1de58b3ca5c31543205353108Polygone<div class="wikitext"><p>At some point Firefox chose to limit the number of pages retained in the history, based on the system configuration iirc.</p>
<p>about:config</p>
<pre>
places.history.expiration.transient_current_max_pages
</pre>
<p>Which probably fixed the performances issue, but also disregarded the user configuration at the time.</p>
</div>2015-05-02T04:52:47ZBy Chris Siebenmann on /blog/web/BrowserHistoryForevertag:CSpace:blog/web/BrowserHistoryForever:0bf7c085e862fa0d220dabea78bb7528137b476bChris Siebenmann<div class="wikitext"><p>Oh yes, that's an excellent point. Long ago I discovered that allowing
Firefox to search my history when I entered things in the URL bar caused
what could politely be called 'catastrophic performance problems', so I
disabled that. Life might be better there these days, but for various
reasons I basically never enter URLs that way (<a href="https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/ToolsDmenu">I have other, generally
faster mechanisms</a>).</p>
<p>It's possible that this means I'm missing out on something convenient.
It's also possible that Firefox has optimized this since those days,
although I suspect not; massive history databases have always been an
outlier case.</p>
<p>(Firefox does optimize some aspects of this these days; for example,
history is looked up asynchronously. Usually the lookups finish fast
enough that you don't notice, but if I start Firefox for the first time
on a sufficiently loaded system <a href="https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/BookmarksAlternative">my initial page</a>
will first show up with unvisited links and then they'll progressively
go visited over the next tens of seconds or so. Since I keep my Firefox
session running almost all the time, this rarely affects me.)</p>
</div>2015-04-30T21:09:01ZBy Reid on /blog/web/BrowserHistoryForevertag:CSpace:blog/web/BrowserHistoryForever:99edab2265821ea9e5e92fae802ebe6197950543Reidhttp://rae.tnir.org<div class="wikitext"><p>Along a similar vein, I keep my bookmarks forever, and Chrome has serious performance issues because of this. Keystrokes have a 4-second delay (presumably while it searches my bookmarks for matching sites). :-/</p>
<p>Reid</p>
</div>2015-04-30T19:17:27Z