gHacks technology news » history http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:24:03 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Speed Up Firefox By Limiting The History http://www.ghacks.net/2009/07/11/speed-up-firefox-by-limiting-the-history/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/07/11/speed-up-firefox-by-limiting-the-history/#comments Sat, 11 Jul 2009 14:09:17 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=14318 firefoxThe Firefox web browser will save visited websites for a minimum of 90 days and a maximum of 180 days in the Firefox history by default. The hard limit is set to 40000 websites that are stored in the History. When that limit is reached old history entries will be deleted from the database that contains all the visited websites. Some users have experienced massive startup problems if their Firefox history database contains lots of entries.

Some users, especially those with the Google Toolbar installed, experienced a huge history database that had a size of several hundreds Megabytes. A good way of speeding up the Firefox web browser is to limit the history that it records.

Most users know that it is possible to change the minimum days the history is stored in the Firefox options. What only a few know is that there are additional settings in the about:config dialog that make it possible to change the hard limit and the maximum days a website is kept in the history.

firefox speed up

To speed up Firefox by limiting the history do the following: Open a new web browser tab and load the page [about:config]. Now filter for the term [browser.history] and locate the following three parameters:

  • browser.history_expire_days: The maximum days that Firefox stores websites in the history database. (default 180)
  • browser.history_expire_days_min: The minimum days that Firefox stores websites in the history database (default 90)
  • browser.history_expire_sites: Defines the hard limit (that is the maximum) of websites that are stored in the Firefox history. Reducing the amount from 40000 to a lower value can help a lot.

Reducing both the minimum and maximum values to a lower number can improve the performance of the web browser especially during startup. There are no perfect values which means that the user has to experiment a bit to find the values best suited for the browsing situation. Suggested values are 7,14,28 or 56 days for both settings. Users who want to get rid of the history completely need to use 0 as the value in both parameters.

Restarting the web browser after changing the parameters should get rid of the websites that exceed the maximum that has been set by the user. It might be needed to optimize the SQLite database after the procedure to ensure that the database is not fragmented because of this change.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/07/11/speed-up-firefox-by-limiting-the-history/feed/ 5 Block Websites From Appearing In Firefox History http://www.ghacks.net/2009/07/09/block-websites-from-appearing-in-firefox-history/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/07/09/block-websites-from-appearing-in-firefox-history/#comments Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:19:39 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=14279 firefoxThere are many users who like to use the history of their web browser as it provides them with faster access to websites as well as a way to find websites again that they have opened in the past. There are also users who prefer to block the history completely as they value their privacy over the comfort that it offers.

Firefox users have another possibility in the form of the Firefox History Block add-on. This add-on allows to specify websites or domains that should not be added to the Firefox history. Every other website and domain is added to the Firefox history normally.

firefox block website

New websites and domains can be added by simply opening the options in the Firefox add-on menu which gives users the opportunity to block urls from being displayed in the Firefox history. The very same menu offers the means to unblock websites the same way they are blocked. There is unfortunately no way of managing the list of blocked add-ons more easily. There is no way of displaying the blocked websites and domains at the moment.

The Block History add-on is available at the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/07/09/block-websites-from-appearing-in-firefox-history/feed/ 11 Male or Female? Your Browser’s History Might Tell http://www.ghacks.net/2008/07/28/male-or-female-your-browsers-history-might-tell/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/07/28/male-or-female-your-browsers-history-might-tell/#comments Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:19:00 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=5663 A website should not be able to read the the history of websites that a user visited previously. An ingenious CSS hack and some spicy Javascript is however enough to use a trial and error method to find out if a user has been to specific websites.

Some webmasters use this method to display the social bookmarking and news batches of websites that their visitors have been through which is very effective in gaining popularity on those websites.

Others came up with a script that is using this method to estimate if the visitor is male or female. The Javascript makes use of the Quantcast Top 10K websites and the male:female ratio that they provide plus a neat algorithm to compute the percentages for male and female likeliness.

Mine turned out 50/50 because I don’t use the history at all. Good luck and let me know what the script thinks about your gender..

The same principle could possible be used to display targeted advertisements. Have been to a lot of parenting websites lately? How about parenting ads? Like sports? How about an ESPN subscription? It’s a bit scary, don’t you think?

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/07/28/male-or-female-your-browsers-history-might-tell/feed/ 7 Watch Documentaries Online http://www.ghacks.net/2008/01/10/watch-documentaries-online/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/01/10/watch-documentaries-online/#comments Wed, 09 Jan 2008 22:05:49 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2008/01/10/watch-documentaries-online/ It seems that more and more specialized websites appear that list videos from sites such as Youtube and Google Video. At the beginning websites that would post lists of tv shows and movies were the most common ones and they are still very popular. Other websites emerge now that only list anime, sports or music videos.

One sector that was a bit neglected until now was documentaries. Best Online Documentaries is a website that tries to change that. They offer nearly 650 documentaries embedded in their website that are hosted on servers like Google Video or Youtube. Viewers can watch the documentaries online on their website.

Several categories like Biographies, History, Science and Mystery and numerous subcategories make it easy to find what you are interested in. All the videos that I tested worked and have a playing time of 40+ minutes. The language is English. Below is one of the videos that you can find on the website. You could really spend several days there.

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