Firefox 2 uses mork data system which isn’t optimized a bit. Firefox 3 uses sqlite instead which might work better. Try it out :)

I agree, they could add an option in the Privacy tab just below the one for history. It would be like:

Remember visited pages for the last ____ days.
Remember downloaded files for the last ____ days.

Yeah i agree “a browser should not clutter it’s own files to the point it hinders it’s function” and we all know how clueless Lusers can be, lol.

But I wouldn’t want FF to “purge old entries automatically after reaching some sort of threshold” unless I had some sorta control over it. Option to turn it on or off and the ability to set threshold to want I want it to be would be nice ya know.

@Starhawk – yeah, the DownThemAll thing is cool.

But, personally I doubt anything can speed up downloads that much – I mean, there is only so much download bandwidth you could use. ;)

@Matt` – yeah, it’s a core Firefox option, not an extension. But IMHO a browser should not clutter it’s own files to the point it hinders it’s function like that. When designing software you pretty much should assume that the average user will do no maintenance unless you remind him…

I’m pretty sure there’s an option somewhere to clear your download history when you close firefox, but it might be that it’s a part of “Download Statusbar”.

If you haven’t seen it, that’s an extension that puts download information into a statusbar at the bottom of the screen. Damn fine extension too – useful, unobtrusive, definite improvement over the download window… one of the first extensions I install if I’m setting up Firefox from scratch for some reason

Thinking about it I might be wrong on the speed increase. I seldom use it to download Really Large files (wget would be my preference there) or to download like 100s of files at once. DownThemAll might (and probably does) increase speed there. Any way its a cool add on and a bit more powerful than the built in download manager.

And yeah FF is buggy in some ways: this soft of behavior SHOULD if at all possible be prevented. Report it to them, I’m sure they know about it but enuff people bitch about it they might fix it ;)

And btw I kinda agree on the text file/ XML thing. XML has its uses and I actually like it but sometimes ya can’t beat simplicity!!

Hmmm I would have thought ya already knew about that one. It is kinda an old issue and any time FF is acting flakey it NEVER hurts to like clean it up some (cookies history and such), might not help probably won’t but it certain can’t hurt. haha.

Sometimes I use FF’s download manager and sometimes I use an extension for downloads: DownThemAll! Useful ya know if ya find a whole directory full of (cough cough) MP3s. I don’t know if it has the same problem or not, I keep its history cleaned up so I’ve never noticed.

BTW don’t believe the “increases speed up to 400%” on the DownThemAll Mozilla page. I have never timed it but I can’t notice hardly any difference at all (in Ubuntu, been so long since i used it in windows who knows). A 400% increase I believe I would notice :)