My firefox was getting a bit sluggish, which sucks.. because it's still my favourite browser. Today was just a disaster. The entire browser would just hang for seconds at a time, slow startup times.. etc.
I realized that firefox was running on a profile I made 4 years ago. It has seen Firefox 2.0 up until 3.6, as well as some beta and minefield builds. Dozens of add-ons have been installed, updated, removed and installed again and it has been migrated to 3 different computers. This couldn't be good for performance. Who knows what kind of settings, files and data is left hanging here and there.
So I went ahead today and created a new firefox profile. This is simply done by starting firefox with the --profilemanager argument.
I needed my bookmarks, history and saved passwords though. To get these 3 items, copy the following files from your old, to your new profile (while firefox is not running!).
- places.sqlite - Contains history and bookmarks.
- signon.sqlite - Contains all your saved passwords.
- key3.db - Contains the encryption keys to decode your passwords.
After that, it was just a matter of installing Firebug, Firecookie and noscript again.
Right now the browser feels like new again. If you're seeing similar problems, I can highly recommend it.. but I can't be help responsible for losing any of your valuable data.. make backups! Your new profile will also have none of the customizations you've ever made.
It might be useful to add where these files are found on osx, windows and linux :)
cheers!
Check the "Where to find the profile folder" link.
Thanks man. I completely forgot how old my profile was. It had started to crash Firefox recently, and I was on the verge of switching to another browser...
You saved a soul :)
I know that if you have installed Xmarks, a new install can keep your passwords and bookmarks once you reinstall it.
Weave may also do that, (I'm running both actually), but I've never tried to do that with it.
I should have added, and yes, I'm planning a whole new install once 4.0 comes out. This one is getting a little ragged and idiosyncratic. But I think I can wait until then.
There is a way to do this without getting all messy with files and folders and such: MozBackup (http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/).
With it you can select a profile to back up, pick and choose what exactly you want to save, and then restore into a different profile.
Handy and free, and backs up Thunderbird stuff too.
djn,
Good suggestion. I personally trust bash more than automated backups.. but mozbackup is probably much easier for most.
Evert
Something else you might try to improve performance is to open the SQLite files you mentioned and run VACUUM; (similar to running OPTIMIZE TABLE on a MySQL database, though it applies to an entire file/database).