Why and how webbrowsers eat up your hard drive

[Rockin Robbins]

Seems to me that the fix is just to turn session restore off entirely. How often do you actually use session restore? Once a month?

But the other thing to keep in mind is that the recent SSDs have an expected life longer than the mechanical hard drives we trust so much. All those writes have minor significance and might reduce your SSD life to only six years or so! Yes, that's a catastrophe, but on the scale of one to ten it rates about a 3.

Your SSD shouldn't be the place Firefox keeps its files anyway! That's what mechanical drives are for. SSDs are for keeping operating systems so they boot fast. EVERYTHING else should be on mechanical hard drives. Then your SSD is very minimally written to and it will live for ten years after it is tossed in the trash because it's obsolete. Think about it. What do you do when you happen across a perfectly working 80GB parallel hard drive from 2003? Do you test it to see how good it is? Do you thank your lucky stars for this precious find? No, you toss it in the trash, same as you will do with a perfectly working SSD of only 120GB that you find five years from now. All these guys will be in the trash long before any browser writes cause any problems.

The research will find all browsers do the same thing, other than maybe Konqueror, which nobody runs (they're missing a real treat!). The worst will be Chrome. Unless the Microsloth browsers are playing Parcheesi with themselves when they're supposed to be doing DNS searches. Parcheesi takes up a lot of disk space.

In the meantime, Firefox is still the best browser out there. It's so customizable and so useful it stays on my Microsloth and Linux machines.