Firefox profile

[techman]

I am running firefox 105.0.3 64 bit on win10. I have been copying my profile since the early days from machine to machine and up through this current version. The profile is now over 200 mb. I clear cache and minimize the number item in the cookie list. I assume that there are likely many files that today ore ophan and could be deleted. Also a large segment of file data seems to be files with a name having a long string of characters and the extension of ".final"

Can someone advise how I can clean up the profile to reduce its size.

Paul

[tanstaafl]

I use Firefox for streaming video and finicky web sites, while using Vivaldi as my default browser, so I might not be a good example. My Firefox profile is 76MB because I use custom settings for history that disable everything individually (its counter-productive to disable history), and disabled both the offline and disk cache.

Firefox lumps together cookies and web site data in its settings nowadays which makes it hard to restrict persistent storage (non-cookies) for all sites as setting dom.storage.enabled false breaks features on a lot of web sites. I suggest you go to "manage data" in the cookies and site data section of the privacy and security settings , look at how much storage is used by each web site, and figure out if it makes sense to block specific web sites from storing more than cookies. Most web sites assume they can store site data, so in many cases it might be counter-productive to block it as that would break some features.

I use the cookie auto-delete add-on at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... utodelete/ to automatically delete all data (not just cookies) for a web site when a tab closes unless I used the add-ons icon to enable storage for that web site. There are other similar add-ons if you don't like that one.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/storage
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/bl ... ta-firefox

[therube]

> a large segment of file data seems to be files with a name having a long string of characters and the extension of ".final"

So then the question becomes, what created them?
".final" are not from FF itself (AFIK).

So an extension perhaps?


Oh, wait.

.final "are" FF.
PROFILE...storage/.../cache/morgue/xxx/{guid}.final

So just what does that garbage mean?
(On my end, throughout numerous Profiles, 660 objects using 34 MB of space.)

https://github.com/KittyGiraudel/site/issues/33
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1647017
https://github.com/berdav/snappy-fox (untested)
about:cache?storage=disk will list ".final"


(Speaking of that, about:cache..., a logical person might want to list the items - oh, say by Size.
But then you remember - ah, this is FF, so... NOT!)

[therube]

So, just what does one need?

/storage/
no idea what is in there, nor of it is of value, but my thought would be, not.
/gmp.../ /security_state/ /datareporting/ !!! /gmp.../ /shader.../ /weave/ /crashes/ ...
again, no idea, but i'd think that most of it is of very limited value.
(Though I will say one thing about /datareporting/ - malware .)

So just what is left that may be of importance?
/sessionstore-backups/, /extensions/, /bookmarkbackups/, /xulstore/, /extension-store/, places.*, favicons.*, cookies.*, key4.*, & rest of those ancillary, smaller files.

I have no idea about, storage-sync-v2.sqlite-wal, what that is for?

[BruceAWittmeier]

If you want to determine which files are the largest and the last date accessed in your profile, you can locate the profile directory using Windows File Manager and enter a "*" in the search field. This will basically return every file (the wild card).

Then you have the ability to sort using Windows File Manager using the file title bar column name -- size (directories will be first), date, etc.

I would suggest an Addon "Bookmark Dupes" to identify duplicates. This is one of the files that will grow over time and without paying attention -- out of control. In my case there are several bookmarks/places files they are the largest files in my profile.

Clearing Cache and other general house-keeping utilities can also help. I don't believe there are many changes that are residual with Firefox to cause growth other than cache, bookmarks and addons.