Firefox is my favorite browser. Not because it is best in terms of security aspects, or user features or speed of browsing, but because of its open source nature, which allows hundreds of developers to build modules and addons, which seamless integrate with it to provide you a customized web surfing experience.

Mozilla Links has recently published a post describing a neat way to speedup firefox and surf web faster. It is by defragging its SQLite database.

If you are not aware, SQLite is an ACID-compliant embedded relational database management system contained in a relatively small (~225 KB) C programming library. The source code for SQLite is in the public domain.

How SQLite Databases Affect Firefox Speed

Since Firefox 3.0, bookmarks, history and most storage is kept in SQLite databases. Also, the default history time span was raised from 9 to 90 days as it became more discoverable and useful thanks to the awesome bar, so depending on your browsing habits it could represent some pretty large databases.

As any other database, SQLite databases become fragmented over time and empty spaces appear all around. But, since there are no managing processes checking and optimizing the database, these factors eventually result in a performance hit. So, a good way to improve startup and some other bookmarks and history related tasks is to defragment and trim unused space from these databases.

How to Optimize and Defrag SQLite Database to Improve Firefox Speed

Follow these simple steps.

• Open the Error Console: Tools menu/Error Console
• In the Code text box paste this (it’s a single line):

  Components.classes["@mozilla.org/browser/nav-history-service;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsPIPlacesDatabase).DBConnection.executeSimpleSQL("VACUUM");

• Press Evaluate. All the UI will freeze for a few seconds while databases are VACUUMed

[Via]