I don't understand, Firefox is a great browser, but the location bar is so slow. It literally was stuck for 30 seconds looking up something in its database.
Is there a way to tell it to stop trying to be so smart about matching URLs?
(Edit: is there a way to limit the history so it purges old pages that have only been visited once, but it keeps pages that were visited multiple times?)
There's an add-on to this automatically as well.
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.
Aas 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.
about:config
browser.urlbar.maxRichResults
Set that to 0 and it'll stop searching (Or just set it lower and see if you can't get better performance out of it)
It's searching a HUGE database if it's taking 30 seconds, have you considered reducing your history length?
You might find a couple of tips here Firefox 3.5 Slow and Hangs After Typing a Few Letters in URL Location Bar around cleaning out your SQLLite places database.
