Netscape 6.1b and large bookmark files

Oct 19, '01 01:47:14AM

Contributed by: tomsinclair

I've been using NS6.1 Beta almost since it first came out and really like it. It's fast, stable and works on all the Web sites I use, including my online banking. However, lately it started to become very sluggish, both starting up and rendering pages. So slow, in fact, that I thought it had locked up and did a Force Quit.

Not wanting to lose the use of this browser, I decided that the cause might be some preferences or the cache becoming corrupted. I deleted my user profile folder (saving off my bookmarks file, of course) and re-ran NS6.1, causing it to rebuild the profile. It came up quite snappily and was its old self again. I was vindicated!

However, that was not to be. I copied in my bookmarks file and restarted Netscape. Suddenly it was back to its old, sluggish self. It then dawned on me that the likely cause was that my bookmark file had too many entries or was too large for the browser to easily manipulate. To test this, I removed the file, restarted Netscape and let it build a default bookmark file. Lo and behold, it was running quite nicely again. I'm going to edit my old bookmarks and clear out some unused entries, but this still sounds like a bug to me. The exact same file in IE works fine.

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