I have researched the Iko-Iko history before! It was years ago. But that and the dancing baby on Allie McBeal tended to drive me nuts over the years - the baby especially, still does, have to block it out of my mind -causing me to have looked up both extensively at one time or another. What I remember of them is not so much anymore. Time to look them up again!
And yeah, there are tons of add-ons for backing up bookmarks. I used to use those but this was in the days before Firefox Sync came with Firefox, so for all of it to work I had to use add-ons like FEBE and SQL Lite. I think Foxmarks came into this, too.
The thing was, I reinstall operating systems so frequently to increase hard drive size, upgrade to newer operating systems or (back in the day) get rid of experimental AOL installs that were fubaring everything else that managing the backups became another task I just couldn't deal with, even with the master/slave configuration I had going on for a good 7-8 years and an external hard drive to back things up to (which I still back up music, files, videos, pictures, and some CSS and other stuff to).
I'd almost always lose the last week's worth of bookmarks on a fresh install or have to deal with an HTML file holding the last set of bookmarks that there was no way to merge with the new set, so I just stopped saving them the last five years or so.
Before I read where you said it, I was going to suggest the about:config setting but I see you got there, so that's good. As far as not wanting to hang onto my History, that came from learning about 10 years ago that most browsers have a major security hole in them where if you visit a page that marks the links you click on as visited (by changing link color), the owner of that website can exploit some kind of hole in the browser's code to view all the history in your History folder (which was one reason I held off using a visited color on my own blog for years: I didn't want to scare anyone else who might be as paranoid as I am). I am nothing if not eternally paranoid about hackers and being hacked, so for a good many years (I want to say at least 5-6, from the day the feature became available in Firefox until about one year ago) I set Firefox to "never remember History" so that it wouldn't even retain an in-session list of where I'd been.
Somewhere within the last year or two, though, I decided it was too much of a pain in the ass to keep that up, so now I have it set to forget History on exit. Which makes me uncomfortable because of said security hole above, but I'm trading paranoia for a bit more convenience.
If it wasn't for that one security hole my History settings might have historically been a bit more liberal, but being I've used Firefox steadily since 2006 and Firefox has always used too much RAM, the other problem is having a huge History list would probably make it even slower and more RAM-chewing and harder to deal with than it already is. So it's kind of hard to say...maybe if Firefox were (and had always been) a bit lighter on its feet - like say, Opera - I would be more of a History saver now.
While I'm on the topic of Firefox, anyway, I was wondering if I could ask you something, because I've literally googled within the last few months and couldn't find the answer... did Firefox not used to have a setting for text-wrapping? It seems the setting's been missing for the last year or so. Do you know where it is, or where it went?
I did find a way to change something in about:config to get text to wrap (which is kind of needed because with all the CSS editing I do, I have to view source a lot), but changing an about:config setting is not what I want to have to do every time I reinstall an OS and/or reinstall Firefox.
no subject
And yeah, there are tons of add-ons for backing up bookmarks. I used to use those but this was in the days before Firefox Sync came with Firefox, so for all of it to work I had to use add-ons like FEBE and SQL Lite. I think Foxmarks came into this, too.
The thing was, I reinstall operating systems so frequently to increase hard drive size, upgrade to newer operating systems or (back in the day) get rid of experimental AOL installs that were fubaring everything else that managing the backups became another task I just couldn't deal with, even with the master/slave configuration I had going on for a good 7-8 years and an external hard drive to back things up to (which I still back up music, files, videos, pictures, and some CSS and other stuff to).
I'd almost always lose the last week's worth of bookmarks on a fresh install or have to deal with an HTML file holding the last set of bookmarks that there was no way to merge with the new set, so I just stopped saving them the last five years or so.
Before I read where you said it, I was going to suggest the about:config setting but I see you got there, so that's good. As far as not wanting to hang onto my History, that came from learning about 10 years ago that most browsers have a major security hole in them where if you visit a page that marks the links you click on as visited (by changing link color), the owner of that website can exploit some kind of hole in the browser's code to view all the history in your History folder (which was one reason I held off using a visited color on my own blog for years: I didn't want to scare anyone else who might be as paranoid as I am). I am nothing if not eternally paranoid about hackers and being hacked, so for a good many years (I want to say at least 5-6, from the day the feature became available in Firefox until about one year ago) I set Firefox to "never remember History" so that it wouldn't even retain an in-session list of where I'd been.
Somewhere within the last year or two, though, I decided it was too much of a pain in the ass to keep that up, so now I have it set to forget History on exit. Which makes me uncomfortable because of said security hole above, but I'm trading paranoia for a bit more convenience.
If it wasn't for that one security hole my History settings might have historically been a bit more liberal, but being I've used Firefox steadily since 2006 and Firefox has always used too much RAM, the other problem is having a huge History list would probably make it even slower and more RAM-chewing and harder to deal with than it already is. So it's kind of hard to say...maybe if Firefox were (and had always been) a bit lighter on its feet - like say, Opera - I would be more of a History saver now.
While I'm on the topic of Firefox, anyway, I was wondering if I could ask you something, because I've literally googled within the last few months and couldn't find the answer... did Firefox not used to have a setting for text-wrapping? It seems the setting's been missing for the last year or so. Do you know where it is, or where it went?
I did find a way to change something in about:config to get text to wrap (which is kind of needed because with all the CSS editing I do, I have to view source a lot), but changing an about:config setting is not what I want to have to do every time I reinstall an OS and/or reinstall Firefox.