How about an Internet browser that doesn’t continually grow

[Ketchup]

Crazy idea: Why not give a web browser a set amount of space for history. When it gets full, it just overrites, like a page file.

I have used Firefox ever since the first release, as I loved the tabs that IE didn’t offer at the time. Tried a couple others since then, but always seem to return to Firefox.

I like keeping my computer running well, so every week or so I defragment the hard drive. One thing I notice is that is spends most of the time in the directory of downloaded stuff from the web. It’s ridiculous. All because the data uses the traditional windows methodology or writing to the first byte of free space, and skipping over whatever is in the way.

So my question is, why must this be? Think about it for a sec. Most of us have plenty of room on our hard drives, and unless you are installing, uninstalling all day long, nothing is going to write to a hard drive like a web browser in moderate to frequent use.

My solution: why not make a file with a similar structure to the Windows page file, or a hibernate file. It would write until the file is full, then overwrite from oldest up.
What do you all think?

 

[lxskllr]

My Firefox cache sits in ram. Restart the computer, and it's gone. It's currently at 250mb after 4 days of up time. This is in Debian. You could probably do something similar with Windows, but it would probably take more work.

 

[Ketchup]

My Firefox cache sits in ram. Restart the computer, and it's gone. It's currently at 250mb after 4 days of up time. This is in Debian. You could probably do something similar with Windows, but it would probably take more work.

It does pretty good until a reboot, or closing Firefox. I close Firefox too much at home, I'll admit.

 

[Nothinman]

Crazy idea: Why not give a web browser a set amount of space for history. When it gets full, it just overrites, like a page file.

I have used Firefox ever since the first release, as I loved the tabs that IE didn’t offer at the time. Tried a couple others since then, but always seem to return to Firefox.

I like keeping my computer running well, so every week or so I defragment the hard drive. One thing I notice is that is spends most of the time in the directory of downloaded stuff from the web. It’s ridiculous. All because the data uses the traditional windows methodology or writing to the first byte of free space, and skipping over whatever is in the way.

So my question is, why must this be? Think about it for a sec. Most of us have plenty of room on our hard drives, and unless you are installing, uninstalling all day long, nothing is going to write to a hard drive like a web browser in moderate to frequent use.

My solution: why not make a file with a similar structure to the Windows page file, or a hibernate file. It would write until the file is full, then overwrite from oldest up.
What do you all think?

Chrome uses SQLite for it's storage. It's not all one big file, but it's consolidated more than what IE does.

Frankly, I think you're too worried about minutia that can be ignored. Why are you wasting time manually defragging anything and taking it so far as to watch it?

 

[kleinkinstein]

Memory Restart
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/memory-restart

 

[Ketchup]

Memory Restart
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/memory-restart

Thank you, looks good. I'll have to give it a try this weekend.

 

[nemesismk2]

I will have to give memory restart a try when i get some time

 

[Pray To Jesus]

no point fixing a problem that very few people care about

 

[Pray To Jesus]

and get an SSD

got to keep up with the times pop