OneAndOneIs2

So following my last post on how Firefox has been annoying me by being buggy lately, I came across something I didn't know about FF version 3 that I thought was worth commenting on.

Because of a misbehaving extension, Tina lost all her bookmarks. In the hopes of restoring them, I took a look at her profile, and didn't see the expected plain-text bookmarks file. But I *did* discover a directory called "bookmarksbackup"

It turns out that FF saves backups of all bookmarks on a daily basis. About a week's worth. So you can always go into the bookmarks manager and restore your bookmarks from yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that..

And that was handy, and something worth knowing, and I was quite impressed, since that never used to be a feature - if you lost your bookmarks, you lost your bookmarks.

But what I found even *more* noteworthy was that, when I was looking for where Firefox stores bookmarks now, I found that it was stored in a file named places.sqlite

Yep.. as of version 3, they stopped using a plain-text file for bookmarks, and shunted them into a database instead. And not just bookmarks: Browser history, favicons, and even input history - when you type something into the awesomebar, it makes note of it for future use.

You might think it's a bit pointless, putting bookmarks into a database - who has THAT many bookmarks?? And I'd tend to agree if that were all they'd done.

But putting HISTORY into a database.. that I can understand. I keep quite a long history (90 days) and I visit quite a lot of websites. So there's a *lot* of data. And when you think about it, your browser needs to be able to check through your history *every time* it loads a web page: Many pages render links differently depending on whether or not you've visited them.

So a history database makes perfect sense: It can be big enough to justify it, and it needs to be FAST for a page to be loaded and displayed quickly.

And if you've got a database anyway, you might as well shunt as much stuff as you can into it. Like bookmarks.

Like so many things, this is one of those features that's completely invisible to the end user: I'm on version 3.5.7 and I only just discovered that FF has been using a database for history & bookmarks since 3.0.0 today.

But the combination of FF keeping bookmark backups; and the fact that it uses a database instead of plain text for all this stuff; I was impressed by. It's two very good ways of doing things, that probably took a lot of work on Mozilla's part and yet would have gone completely unnoticed by 99% of their users. So kudos to them for that. I'm impressed.