buzzy | Oh, hey, I have something to talk about

If you read this, read the next entry before you attempt anything!

Ever since whichever version of Firefox came out with the new tab screen that reminds me of the one in Chrome (Firefox 14, I think), the fancy little thumbnails never showed up for me. They worked on another computer that I use less often and my brother's computers, but for some reason my main computer never showed the thumbnails. After exhausting the resources Mozilla had about the issue (reseting wasn't an option because I wasn't going to sit through downloading and setting up every add-on again), I decided to fire up SQLite Manager and opened up the various files that make up my profile. The first stop was places.sqlite. There, I found that Firefox still kept information about my history that I deleted. (Gee, thanks. Now I'm going to have to clear my history after I clear my history.) I cleared out a good chunk of the moz_places and moz_historyvisits followed by compacting the database, resulting in a file that less than 25% of its original size. I looked at more files, but it wasn't until I compacted urlclassifier3.sqlite (which I found in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<Profile Name>) that I finally saw some action on the new tab page. Most of the pages I pinned on there are pages on my local web server, and loading those caused the thumbnail to appear. Two of the pages I pinned are my Reading page on Dreamwidth and my Friends page on LiveJournal. For some reason, neither page ever finishes loading, so neither page ever gets to show on the new tab page. I left those pages loading for half an hour and while every graphic, CSS, and (as far as I can tell) JavaScript file has loaded, the page just gets stuck there waiting for the Godot server, I guess. Now it bugs me to have made it this far — I can get thumbnails on my new tab page, but now I have gaping holes where pages that once loaded fine now never finish loading. (Seriously, whatever happened to timing out?)

I wish I had a better idea of what's in those various databases and tables so I knew which ones I could clear out without screwing things up. A lot of the information I found was from the Firefox 3 era. It would also be nice if some of the changes cascaded, i.e., if I delete a record in one table, it removes it from any related table. An example of this would be deleting a site from moz_places would delete the record of visits to that site in the moz_historyvisits table. That would've saved me a lot of trouble. (SQLite is capable of doing that, but I guess the people working on Firefox chose not to use that feature.)