Apparently, Firefox is supposed to handle this for you without any action on your part:<p><a href="http://blog.bonardo.net/2010/01/20/places-got-async-expiration" rel="nofollow">http://blog.bonardo.net/2010/01/20/places-got-async-expirati...</a><p>According to that post, Firefox now detects your system specs and chooses an appropriate history expiration time. The post also details a preference that allows you to tweak Firefox to retain a specific <i>number</i> of history entries (rather than a certain age).
I rely almost exclusively on my history (that's why I can't use Chrome with its "less-than-awesome" url bar (compared to Firefox), but that's another story.)<p>Anyway, a much better way would be to clear by frequency of visit:<p><pre><code> . all
. all but visited daily
. all but visited weekly
. all but visited monthly
</code></pre>
or by date of last visit<p><pre><code> . all
. all but visited during the last 24 hours
. all but visited during the last week
. all but visited during the last month
</code></pre>
EDIT: like said below I never, ever, should have to even think about this, the user is not a garbage collector.
No, we shouldn't have to remove our old history to speed up our browser. The UI as it is now, is good (like you said, for porn). The browsers should remove the old history by themselves when needed.
> On Safari, you can only clear all your history.<p>This is wrong. On Safari, you can open Show All History and delete individual visits in your history (just select it and press delete). Or you can just go ahead and delete each date groupings, use search to delete only certain sites, etc. This is the same for Firefox, but I believe the ability to do this is not present in Chrome.<p>I found this to be much more powerful than Chrome's, since many times I want to delete browsing history for certain sites, not for certain period of time. (But Safari's UI allows me to delete both.)
Browsers already get rid of the oldest pages first. And since pages are refreshed when you visit them, that means the least-frequently visited pages will be forgotten first.<p>Firefox has a heuristic based on memory size to keep the history fast. <a href="http://blog.bonardo.net/2010/01/20/places-got-async-expiration" rel="nofollow">http://blog.bonardo.net/2010/01/20/places-got-async-expirati...</a> But you can go to about:config and change places.history.expiration.max_pages if you want to get rid of old pages faster (or slower).
A solution to this would be to not have the omnibar scan through the <i>entire</i> history when typing in it. Instead, if the history does become too big, it should only wade through frequently visited pages and pages visited in the past month (or whatever is the best tradeoff for speed).
Yeah, Chrome's history options are weird. Why would I want to delete newer stuff first? It really should be the other way around--older stuff first. Or better yet, an option to delete individual items. <p>When I'm researching and clicking links left and right, I often reach a lot of dead ends. Because Google search is so good, I rarely bookmark the site once I find it, instead relying on the omnibar. Unfortunately, the omnibar always suggests the wrong entry in the history. I want to delete those bad entries so they don't show up in the omnibar.
The fact that you need to worry about history at all for performance reasons is a bug. The fact that typing got slower over time is a regression -- Chrome was carefully designed to specifically not do this. I've notified the appropriate people.
Firefox already handles things the way the author wants.
One should not assume Firefox functions like Chrome and probably should actually try?<p>Preferences => Privacy: Clear your recent history
* last hour
* last 2 hours
* last 4 hours
* today<p>And you can select if you want to clear cache, passwords, etc or everything of course.