The “Awesomebar” is a “smart dropdown” that Mozilla put in the most recent major revision in Firefox. It allows you to type a site by name and it will automatically look for that phrase in your history, favorites, etc. and find it for you.

The problem is, if the URL’s on your site change, the first selection comes up will most likely be the wrong selection. This is because the Awesomebar sorts your drop down list by the most frequently used URL.

To delete an entry from Awesomebar, simply highlight it with your mouse (but don’t click on it) and press the delete key. It’s a nice way to keep Awesomebar up-to-date.

A friend sent this to me today. Firefox uses a bunch of .sqlite files to manage it’s persistent data like your preferences in the “awesomebar”. These files can get quite big and cause a slow computer when using firefox; especially when using the awesomebar and closing the application.

OS X users can use this command to “compact” these files:

for f in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/*.sqlite; do sqlite3 $f 'VACUUM;'; done

Windows users can make use of the SQLite addon to do the same thing. Install the addon, then go to %appdata%mozillafirefoxprofilesxxxxx and look for the .sqlite files.