reducing firefox bloat

[gadget42]

after importing my firefox bookmarks into librewolf i noticed that the new librewolf bookmarks.html file was much smaller than the firefox one, time to investigate!

https://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=538462

bookmarks.html bloated with binary favicon data

Post by richey » April 10th, 2007, 4:42 am

is it possible to prevent FF from saving favicon data in the bookmarks.html file?

This is really annoying, I'm working on a USB stick and the bookmark file grows by 2-6kb with every bookmark I save or view... not to speak that loading takes considerably longer. My bookmark file is already 2 MB, and growing every day.

perhaps it is mildly amusing that this is still a "thing" after almost 20yrs...
also that the OP is "richey" and he is using/working via a USB stick(hey, keep it Tiny dude!)
lol

anywho, i haven't even tried the firefox changes/fixes since i have moved on to Librewolf but thought i would post them here in case the OP disappears/or/whatever.

Post by richey » April 10th, 2007, 3:41 pm
Hi Ed and others,

thanks for the hint- meanwhile I've found the following: there are 4 settings to influence favicons -

// http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.chrome.site_icons ; overwrites all
user_pref("browser.chrome.site_icons",false);
// http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.chrome.favicons
user_pref("browser.chrome.favicons",false);
// http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.chrom ... s.max_size
user_pref("browser.chrome.image_icons.max_size",0);
// http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.chrom ... lbar_icons
user_pref("browser.chrome.load_toolbar_icons",0);

ALL of these settings have to be enabled or disabled to enable/disable the saving of the bloating favicons in the bookmarks file - but there is NO individual setting just influencing the bookmarks file. So, either you don't SEE any favicons at all or you SEE & SAVE them ... automatically, without any choice.

That's not good for portable / USB stick users!

Edit: I found an easier way, close FF, then open bookmarks.html with a good editor such as Wordpad ;-), and replace all occurances of "ICON=" by some crap like "ICXON=". After the next reload, the bookmark file will be "cleaned". As always, backup the file first.

[gadget42]

for the sake of clarity i wanted to note that firefox is vastly different now and the bookmarks are in "places.sqlite" as per:

https://superuser.com/questions/790697/does-firefox-store-bookmarks-as-individual-files-anywhere

the safest thing to do is to start a fresh firefox profile(i also noted that they are rolling out a new "profile manager" thing...sigh)

https://geekermag.com/how-to-enable-and-use-the-new-profile-manager-in-firefox-v138/
https://www.askvg.com/enable-upcoming-profile-manager-feature-in-mozilla-firefox/

for the time being i have switched to Librewolf(mostly to get away from the AI stuff)

as always, ymmv.