Your database sizes aren't much different from mine. My places.sqlite is 73.4MB my urlclassifier3.sqlite (in ~/Library/Caches/Firefox/) is 42MB.

Firefox stores a lot of history information, including individual visits, in order to provide good predictions when typing into the address bar. I'm not sure which heuristics it uses to expire old history, or even whether it's primarily based on database size or age.

We could probably stop storing individual visit information if we fixed bug 704025. But I'm guessing that wouldn't shrink the database much, because dates are tiny compared to URLs and titles.

Which files in your profile folder are the largest?

I was making a general point, not especially directed at you.

Sorry your experience with Firefox has worse than the norm, though.

Firefox 10 or 11 will assume add-ons are compatible by default, which is more or less what you're asking for :)

There will be a few exceptions, such as add-ons with binary components and add-ons that are known to not work.

Remember: A bug not manifesting in your instance of a program is not the same as the program being bug free.

Conversely, a bug manifesting in your instance of a program is not the same as the program being a bug-ridden piece of crap written by insane monkeys.

My first bug report was bug 27610, so we probably overlapped.

Yes, mpt was very much around. I learned a lot from reading mpt's comments in Bugzilla. It's too bad he didn't get along with everyone.

A browser is many of the many apps i run on my systems

FTFY.

(If you're running an email app, a feed aggregation app, and a social network app in your browser, then your browser is going to use some memory.)

I triaged bugs back in 2000, too. What was your username or email address in Bugzilla? :)

Nowadays my focuses are security and finding bugs.

In 2009 I wrote about how to make triage more efficient and more effective. (Tyler linked to my post). And I actually triaged a subset of bugs that way when I was tasked with bringing down the number of crash bug reports.

What exactly do Mozilla do with 100 million dollars of tax-free revenue?

The first thing we do with it is to pay taxes. It was not trivial for us to figure out how to do that.

Are they building a war chest?

You can get a sense of how much we're saving by reading financial reports from previous years. To some extent, we're saving not because we want to save, but because we can only hire people so fast while maintaining quality and culture.

That'd be 500 full time employees at 100k per year with 50 million left over in case of emergencies.

500 full time Mozilla employees and contractors isn't far off.

I've heard a rule of thumb that once you throw in benefits, offices, and travel, the cost of employing someone is about twice their salary. I don't know whether that holds for Mozilla, which has generous employee benefits but many remote employees.

every single time, Firebug and Greasemonkey stop working.

If you use a beta version of Firefox and want to use Firebug, the Firebug developers say you should use the beta version of Firebug. It would be nice if Firefox Beta automatically went out and fetched the beta version of Firebug instead of just saying the version you have is incompatible.

Greasemonkey is often more compatible than its authors let on. I'm using it with Firefox 8 Nightly and it's working fine, despite being marked as only compatible with Firefox 5. I bet it would work in your Firefox 6 Beta just fine.

There's also a competitor to Greasemonkey called Scriptish that is marked as compatible with Firefox 6 beta. I've heard good things about it but haven't tried switching yet.

track add-ons better and not refuse to load them just because they haven't yet been certified to work

That's the plan!

AMO-hosted extensions that use APIs that haven't changed are automatically assumed to work. So are extensions developed using the new SDK.

To do it safely for other extensions, we'll need to gather data from beta users (like you -- thanks!) to find out whether the extension still does its job, whether it causes crashes (crash-stats correlations), and whether it causes other widespread problems (telemetry correlations).

Future beta versions of Firefox will probably ask you whether you also want to beta-test extensions that might not be compatible. For now you have to set a hidden pref to do that.