Firefox browser wear and tear on ssds with multiple tabs

[freddyjollo]

I heard this today on Security Now  - nothing about minidiscs but of sufficient  importance to tell every one here

 

browser.sessionstore.interval

Those who use Firefox know that it has a recovery function eg if the os crashes and needs to restart manually Firefox will offer to restore your tabs. It seems like this funtion can trash ssds by writing its recovery data too frequently to the ssd. ie save the browsers state every 15 seconds. This might happen if you have lots of tabs open all the time. You all probably know that ssds only have a limited life, the cells can only be written a number of times. Those Firefox users who keep lots of tabs open can easily have it write to the ssd mb or gb a day. The default setting is 15000 milleseconds ie every 15 seconds. Users are advised to increase this. Me. I have about 20+ tabs open all the time :oops: and this desk top is on all the day :oops: :oops: :oops: :oops: I had been wondering why a new ssd had gone down to 99% life left so quickly

How to do this

in the url bar type about:config

search for browser.sessionstore.interval

increase the interval to atleast 150000. ( add a 0 )

The researcher who found this out changed his to 30 minutes. ( add 00)

then close the tab. probably a good idea to restart the browser

Seems like it is not just Firefox that does this but also Googles Chrome ( so dont get smug Google the reserachers found a particular case was writing 24gb aday :shock: ) No soln for Google is known as of this post

 

[sfbp]

Nice tip. I bet it's not that hard-disk friendly either

Even worse is the way that Google News defaults to autorefresh every 15 minutes. Therein lies a long story for me to tell one of these days.

[freddyjollo]

this is where I heard it

 

https://twit.tv/shows/security-now/episodes/580?autostart=false

. I personally dont need sessin backups as I have all my tabs set at deaults in the browser any way so easy to restore on a crash

[sfbp]

There's another issue here, No browser should be writing gigabytes of data to your computer. This should only come about because of the latest monster websites which each use three hundred (well, I exaggerate) JavaScript packages from anything up to about 30 sites. I strongly suspect that this problem (and the main reason I abandoned Chrome a couple of years back) is the real driver of the hard disk wearing out. Of course FF has to keep taking snapshots of it if the scripts are running and changing things all the time. The 15-minute refresh on news is one example.

What you and others may prefer to consider (presumably someone out there has tools to measure this - I've got no motivation and cannot be bothered, sorry) is NoScript which allows the user of Firefox to be selective about which sites' JavaScript packages are allowed to run on one's machine. Whitelisting is sort of interactive, one can generally figure out which sites to add. This is the ONLY way I know to allow access to all kinds of websites without being "spied on" and generally having websites take over your computer. Many websites are just a vehicle to load nasty JS onto your machine. Big companies hate NoScript, because they rely on JS to gather information for them. Ed Snowden has been telling people ever since he first rose to prominence, about this tool. Highly recommended. I'm not posting links here, as it may simply draw bots from who-knows-which-cyber-army. But it's easy enough to find in the list of FF add-ons. The PC version (but not the Android version, sadly) allows you to load some or even ALL scripts from a given web page temporarily - you can revoke all temporary permissions very easily. That's what I do when I want to checkin for an airline ticket, for example. You'd be horrified just how many scripts get loaded. Malware in scripts is the new source of trouble, and the reason why "attack websites" can catch their victims.

[freddyjollo]

I thinlk one result of  limiting the  recovery   saving, if you  have lots of tabs open is that browsing might be a more  zippy due to less disc activity