Tweak : Fixing the Firefox.

I have a love-hate relationship with the Firefox internet browser. I know it is one of the safest if not THE SAFEST, most convenient, well organised and all the features that would make a geeky worm goes gaga over it. Well, I am one of those unimpressed geek.

The only issue I'm having an emotional flip-flop with Firefox is the Add-On/Plug-ins feature. Why? Because it is always being automatically downloaded and once it is installed, it always search for updates. I don't need all those extra features because I prefer the native add-on free browser. Disabling it won't exactly put my mind at ease.

Although I always refuse any sort of additional downloads, sometimes I do overlook certain updates. Especially when it comes with a DEFAULT configuration.

The CULPRIT is Ask.com Toolbar. I hate it with passion! And for the past few days, it has been giving me hell.

One thing I need to remind the fans of Firefox is, when you remove your Ask.Com Toolbar, just make sure that you perform this step.

--> Go to C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\components and remove the AskSearch.js file in that folder.

Because although you think by performing uninstall task and everything will magically goes away, in reality, sometimes it doesn't really completely remove all the components of the add-on/plug-ins, and these "containers" that were left behind will cause your browser to go haywire.

Example:
You will get this every time you enter any URL on the address bar. The browser freezes for few seconds and will later produce this error message. What triggers this? It is the damn AskToolbar (I would rather refer to it as Ass TooBAD). It leaves behind the file I mentioned above, and still the browser will try to call it. Stupid or what?


All you need to do is just to remove the AskSearh.js and things will go back to normal. Trust me. It is still a pain in the ass, but it is a curable pain.

One more issue.

If you are a fanatic internet user; say, you use internet 24 hours a day and browse almost all the available pages in the virtual world; you might want to, once in a while clear your cache and browser history. That what we were told to do right? and by doing that we would think that it will be gone, deleted, vanished, cleared, thrash-binned, and whatnot.

Wrong.

You need to perform this instead.

1. Go to your Start Menu, navigate to Run and enter this %appdata%/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/.

2. You will then be diverted to your mozilla profile folder (oddly titled with an extension .default) that housed all your configurations; like bookmark, historical data and so on and so forth.

3. Open that folder, search for this file, places.sqlite . This file contains all your browsing history for as long as you have been using your Firefox browser. The size won't become smaller just because you constantly clear your history.

4. Rename this file place.sqlite.bak or you can delete it if you want (but I would recommend you to rename it, it is always a good practice to do backup). Because this step will force the Firefox to create a new file and will give you less headache every time you want to type in a URL and the browser would "SLOWLY" trying to search for the recommended site for you, based on your browsing history.

There you go. Hopefully it is all clear now. Even the greatest and the awesome-st browser is flawed.