Firefox writes entirely too much to AFS homedirs

[jdreed]

Firefox becomes unusable when there's a network outage, because it spends way too much of its time writing stuff to .mozilla for every URL it loads.

This causes users to assume that Firefox and/or Debathena sucks. And arguably, Firefox does. However, I assert that we can turn cacheing off by default, because it's 2010 and the network is rarely the bottleneck for HTTP traffic. I don't think we can decide to turn history off for users, but there's got to be something we can do.

[xavid]

How about doing something cool with symlinks to move the caching to /tmp/?

[rbasch]

Our extension sets the cache directory to be under /var/tmp.

[jweiss]

It has been a requirement from ops that the user's cache not be in AFS by default approximately forever. As Bob notes our extension takes care of this. I believe our options are either to try to move some of the large DBs out of the users profile (which probably violates least surprise, since I'll bet users expect firefox to remember those things across sessions) or to close this as WFM.

[jdreed]

Firefox, with about a month's worth of browsing history, on a 620 on a 10Mbit network is entirely unusable. We should do something clever with this ticket.

[jdreed]

As noted on zephyr, someone should test FF4 and compare behavior.

[jdreed]

urlcalssifer3.sqlite is still stupidly large. Given that this doesn't vary on a per-user basis (Right? It's Google's malware db, or something?), can we do something awesome with symlinks?

I'm re-milestoning, since if symlinks don't work, I'm not convinced we can implement debathena-geofft-dot-mozilla-fuse-awesomeness-config in time.

[jdreed]

Is this still an issue with FF 10+? I haven't heard anywhere near as many complaints.

[jdreed]

This seems significantly better with FF 10+. If it's not, re-open this with useful fixes. Keeping in mind #329 is a separate ticket.