Force Firefox to not create urlclassifier3.sqlite when Safebrowsing is disabled

I choose to disable Safebrowsing, mainly because I don't want to pay the bandwidth/disk space/processing overhead when I feel I can make a good judgement of the sites I visit. BTW, I have it enabled for my wife's profile. This is turned off by unticking both "Block reported attack sites" & "Block reported web forgeries" options under the Security tab of Firefox's options.

Guesswork & ideas

Until recently, urlclassifier3.sqlite could be deleted & wouldn't be recreated, but for some reason it now is, maybe since Firefox 8??. It comes in a 5MB, which I think is a pre-allocate strategy to avoid fragmentation of the SQLite database, I don't believe it downloads Safebrowsing data when the above 2 options are unticked. Probably need submit a bugzilla bug report to see if it can be resolved.
I actually thought urlclassifier3.sqlite was replaced by a new custom binary storage file designed to make it possible for Firefox Mobile to use Safebrowsing (due to limited storage/memory). Ideally the Safebrowsing datastore would be outside the Firefox profile, and accessible by the user account so multiple profiles could share it. Even better if there was one datastore for the whole computer, updated with the new Mozilla Update Service that is being developed to avoid UAC on Vista+ for silent updates.
There are many reasons to avoid creating unnecessary files (particularly large ones), the ones I can think of off the top of my head are:

1. Takes up excess room on the HDD.
2. Takes up extra space on capacity/speed limited Flash drives with portable Firefox profiles (and may slow down startup & browsing if the file is read in - hopefully not).
3. Causes profile backups to be larger, therefore taking longer to backup/synchronise.

Solution

1. Navigate to you Firefox profile (which can be opened from about:support).
2. Make urlclassifier3.sqlite 0 bytes. Easiest way to do that in Windows is:
   
   1. delete urlclassifier3.sqlite
   2. create a blank text file, by right-clicking in folder, select New->Text Document
   3. rename New Text Document.txt to urlclassifier3.sqlite
3. Make the urlclassifier3.sqlite file readonly
   ->Right-click on file, select Properties, tick Read-only & click OK
4. Done!!!

Firefox 4.0 released

Mozilla released Firefox 4.0 today, with many UI changes, faster everything & improvements to open web technologies.

It appears a lot of early adopters have jumped onto Chrome, together with normal users from massive marketing efforts & other programs which install Chrome during their setup. I'm personally sticking to Firefox because: non-profit organisation with a open web vision, takes privacy seriously (the way Sync works means they never see my data, unlike Google which can see Chrome data - don't think this includes passwords though). Also, 99% of their decisions & planning is in the open, which is incredibly brave (since it opens them to continual criticism), shows how actual transparency works & lets normal people view how these processes/decisions are made.

The things that interest me for this release include:

• New UI which should allow more space for the page (will take a while to used to the changes)
• New Add-ons Manager
• Restartless Add-ons
• Inbuilt Sync
• Quicker startup times
• Hardware accelerated graphic layers drawing for video & pages
• Improved page load
• Faster JavaScript by using JägerMonkey
• Upgrades to DOM and Style Resolution performance
• Do Not Track feature

I won't be upgrading to Firefox 4.0 just yet. I'll wait a little while so my Add-ons are updated (is their an easy way to check?). Also, I have been using the same profile since ~Phoenix v0.3, so plan on doing some research about only transferring over needed user data & setting options (& Add-ons) from scratch. I have done a fair bit of customising, so it will take a bit of effort.

Update (2011-03-29): It took a far bit of yesterday to do it, but I'm now on Firefox 4.0. Used the list of important profile files from Mozilla Support: Recovering important data from an old profile to copy across to the new profile. Cookies wouldn't work at all, so had to export them from the Firefox 3.6 profile to cookies.txt (original Netscape/Mozilla format) using Cookies Exporter and import into the Firefox 4.0 profile using Cookie Importer, worked like a charm!! (better than my attempts to do in low level with sqlite3.exe and/or SQLite Manager).
All Add-ons had to be reinstalled, which is probably a good thing, but took a long time. The Lazarus form recovery database failed to transfer, had to reset. Greasemonkey & Stylish worked well once their data files/database was copied over.
Finally, I made sure preferences for Add-ons were transferred (manually) & I checked the profile prefs.js file to transfer any important hidden settings I had in my old profile.

Download Firefox 4.0 now.

Upgrading to Firefox 3.5 issues

Having recently upgraded to Firefox 3.5 from 3.1b3, I stumbled onto a few issues. In the 2 profiles we use, both showed a empty (blank) Options dialog box with only Ok & Cancel buttons. Also tabs behave strangely and won't close + web pages seemed strange, most had scrollbars on the left hand side.

Solution:

Tried a few different things, but deleting the localstore.rdf file from the profile directory (see How to find your profile) fixed everything. A bit like the Firefox Support article Toolbar keeps resetting and it's solution, Method 2: Delete localstore.rdf manually

Happy now :-)

Actual Solution:

Whoops, turns out my localstore.rdf solution was wrong :-(
It was because I forced SwitchProxy v1.4.1 (homepage & Mozilla Addons page) to be compatible with Firefox 3.5 when it is only claimed to be up to 3.0. Turns out it really was incompatible, who would of thought??

Firefox 3.0 released, download now!!

The Mozilla corporation/community have released Firefox 3.0 today, with many improvements (both UI wise and backend changes).

Similar to Firefox 2.0 & 1.5, this release has had some serious amount of QA pounding on it, I would say it is their most planned & executed release management to date.

The things that interest me for this release include:

• Awesome bar (smart location bar)
• one-click bookmarking
• Tagging history/bookmarks
• Better password manager (not getting in your face)
• New EV certificates (better identification of secure sites)
• Add-ons Manager with inbuilt Addons listing
• Download Manager improvements (mainly resumable across sessions, more robust backend)
• Full Zoom (images & text zoom together)
• Improved Memory Management (cycle collector, reduced leaks, jemalloc allocator to use less memory)
• Faster JavaScript
• Faster Page Load
• Advanced Graphics (reflow rewrite, better SVG/Canvas support, better graphics backend (Cairo))
• Future Weave sync'ing

I only started using 3.0 with the release candidates (RC1), because of the "addons not yet updated" problem. But I found updates for my day-today addons during RC1, so upgraded.

Finally Firefox 3.0 has places support, which I think will make a real difference to users web browsing experience (mainly through the "Awesome bar"). Here's my anticipation from earlier:

When Firefox 1.5 came out, I was already excited about 2.0, what with Places & the SQLite backends, but that didn't really pan out, should be in Firefox 3.0 though...

Firefox 1.5 released today
... Already waiting for Firefox 2.0 (from the 1.8.1 Gecko branch) with its "Places" support (redoing bookmarks, history, feeds etc. into a new user interface and storing in a super fast SQLite DB).

Firefox 3.0 will come off the 1.9 branch, with it's massive Gecko improvements (rewrite rendering using Cairo on all platforms, reflow rewritten, complete SVG support??) and the aforementioned Places with tagging system for bookmarks/history etc.

Download Firefox 3.0 now.
Hopefully download before 3am, 19th June AEST to create a new Guinness world record for the most downloads of a software program in a day!!