costela.net

Neil Williams recently commented on the lack of smart-bookmarks in Firefox/Iceweasel/Chromium and since the post doesn’t accept comments, counter-post FTW.
Maybe I didn’t understand exactly what was meant, but I’m personally trying to see the advantage of having a smart-bookmark sit on the toolbar as opposed to just being used via a label. Both FF/IW and Chrome can do the label thing, where you bookmark something like “http://bugs.debian.org/%s” with a shortcut like “bugs” and can then simply Ctrl-L to the address bar and type “bugs 999999″. Done.
Can the way Epiphany does this be more effective? (actually this is the way Galeon did it way back then and I used to love it before I found out I could be way quicker with the keyboard+shortcut thingy. Not to mention having less clutter in the toolbar.)

And granted: Chromium’s interface doesn’t allow the editing of this shortcut and they only work when imported from FF/IW, but I expect this to be fixed eventually. Doesn’t make much sense to have such a “hidden” feature. [UPDATE: nevermind. As handily pointed out by Chris Butler, you can edit the shortcuts under Options→Basics→Default Search→Manage. It might not be the most intuitive of places to put it, but it's there.]

As for the rest of the reasons for switching mentioned in the original post, I can certainly see where they’re coming from. No real solid counter-arguments there.

[UPDATE: why does the internet insist in making my posts embarrassingly obsolete?]

I had seen this Firefox* SQLite VACUUM trick on Lifehacker, but hadn’t done anything about it. Now for some reason I decided to give it a spin, but manually, since the proposed method didn’t work and I had zero patience to try and debug Firefox’s inner black magic.
Regardless, this certainly breathed some new life in the old guy:

#!/bin/sh
find ~/.mozilla/firefox/ -name *.sqlite | while read db; do 
	sqlite3 $db VACUUM; 
done

It’s no miracle, Firefox’s still a juggernaut, but it makes things sensibly snappier. No idea how long this will last, probably depends on the amount of INSERTS and DELETES that go on daily.

But I wonder why they don’t do that automatically. I thought they did and never bothered to check (still haven’t, to be completely honest). It might be to avoid a small hiccup while the VACUUM’s performed, but then again, so many people complain about Firefox being slower then molasses that I can hardly see the point.

Anyway, it’s easy to complain about other people’s work. Gotta keep reminding myself of the old “show me the code!” motto.

* Iceweasel, whatever…