[londons_explore]

Try clearing your profile.

Turns out having years of history, extensions, and a multi-gigabyte cache makes any browser slow.

[p-e-w]

That's like saying "If your car runs too slow, toss out the back seats."

History and extensions are there for a reason. And managing the cache is the browser's job, not the user's.

[yborg]

It's more like saying stop carrying around the cassette boombox and corpses of your last 3 dogs in the back seats.

[askl]

You can also save some more weight by never filling the gas tank up to more than 25% capacity.

[dylan604]

But that makes high speed chases impractical as you have to keep stopping for gas

[fullstop]

You reminded me of this sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxY0-Qr_l78

[throwaway104782]

You still have to regularly give your (ICE) car an oil change in order to keep it in proper working order.

[Avamander]

Chrome automatically prunes history for quite a while now. Which I personally dislike, as I sometimes need to find something I visited a long time ago.

[justinclift]

Firefox does the same thing too unfortunately, and it doesn't seem like it can be turned off.

It's a real pita for the same reason. Needed to look at browser history older than a few months and discovering it's all been deleted (by Firefox) was a very unpleasant experience.

Seems to be a needless data loss "optimisation" (sic), but I have no idea what the real world use case for that would be.

[osmarks]

I wrote a script (https://github.com/osmarks/random-stuff/blob/master/histrete...) to dump a Firefox places.sqlite database to a separate SQLite database for long-term storage (I run it nightly). It seems to delete stuff based on some combination of visit frequency and last visit time.

I suspect they need to do this to keep history searches fast, since I also separately hacked a bunch of `about:config` options to retain more history and they run quite slowly now, particularly on my phone.

[wackget]

Not sure if I've done anything special but I've got history going back to 2021.

[justinclift]

Interesting. That gives me hope that there might indeed be a setting to change the behaviour. Thanks. :)

[svl]

browser.history.maxStateObjectSize and places.history.expiration.max_pages (both accessible through about:config) should be the settings to modify. Do a web search for those properties to get more information on how they interact.

[justinclift]

Fantastic! Thank you. :)

[alpaca128]

There's a good chance an about:config setting lets you change it. FF has a ton of detailed settings but most are hidden.

On my setup the "manage history" window goes back a bit over 6 months. Unfortunately the list entries don't show a date, so I can't give more precise numbers.