424837 - Additional option to disable Frecency features?

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement)

Description

[Lucas Malor (mail: c6kfnkn2uc AT snkmail DOT c0m)]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b5pre) Gecko/2008032405 Minefield/3.0b5pre
Build Identifier: 

I think "frecency" it's a good feature, but I don't need it at all. An option to disable it completely should be useful to save resources.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Jesse Ruderman]

If "frecency" calculation were disabled, what information would be available to location bar autocomplete?  For example, would number-of-visits be available, or is that as resource-intensive to compute as frecency?

Comment 2

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

I believe dietrich made it so you can set the recalculate interval to 0 for it to never update?

places.frecency.updateIdleTime

That would prevent background updating of frecency, but when you visit pages, they get their frecency updated automatically.

Comment 3

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

By default, frecency will be calculated either:

1. at the time of related actions (visit a page, add a bookmark, etc) for a specific item
2. in batches when the computer is idle for longer than 5 minutes

Yes, setting places.frecency.updateIdleTime=0 will disable background updating entirely.

Comment 4

[Lucas Malor (mail: c6kfnkn2uc AT snkmail DOT c0m)]

But setting places.frecency.updateIdleTime to 0 do not disable it on events, does it?

@Jesse Ruderman: it's a good question, someone could be interested in visit counts only. The option could be: places.frecency.mode - on value 2 acts as current behaviour, on 1 only visit counts are stored, on 0 disable it completely.

Comment 5

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

I really think disabling background updating is enough.  We don't want to add a hidden codepath here, IMO.  Fewer, not more, hidden prefs is the direction we need to go in.

Comment 6

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Bug 451915 - move Firefox/Places bugs to Firefox/Bookmarks and History. Remove all bugspam from this move by filtering for the string "places-to-b-and-h".

In Thunderbird 3.0b, you do that as follows:
Tools | Message Filters
Make sure the correct account is selected. Click "New"
Conditions: Body   contains   places-to-b-and-h
Change the action to "Delete Message".
Select "Manually Run" from the dropdown at the top.
Click OK.

Select the filter in the list, make sure "Inbox" is selected at the bottom, and click "Run Now". This should delete all the bugspam. You can then delete the filter.

Gerv