Firefox hangs when saving pages or images
I often have the need to save a webpage or image for reference or for later reading. I’ve been a happy Firefox user for over a year now, but recently I started noticing that Firefox was slow when saving images or saving webpages. Today when I actually timed it, I waited a full 20 seconds for Firefox to save a page. After Googling it a bit, I found I wasn’t the only one with this problem. It turns out that Firefox uses a file called downloads.rdf to save your downloads history. Somehow the contents doesn’t always get cleared (even if you clear the downloads in the downloads window). Here’s how to fix it:
- Close Firefox.
- Go to your user profile folder. On Windows XP this is:
C:\Documents and Settings\YOURUSERNAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\XXXXXXXX.default
Replace YOURUSERNAME with your user name. XXXXXXXX will be 8 random letters - Delete the downloads.rdf file.
- Restart Firefox.
And that’s all I did to fix it. I guess this would actually be a bug in Firefox, because normally when you delete the downloads history, it clears out the downloads.rdf file. If I’m wrong on this, let me know.
