Slow deleting of cookies now.
First of all I am very disappointed at how difficult you have made it contact Mozilla to voice a particular issue.
My problem is simple and relatively new. While I really do enjoy using Firefox as my browser, including offering my support for a browsing platform that is not dedicated mostly to building their billion dollar empire, some issues do frustrate me from time to time.
The one that is now happening is the new system to delete cookies from my advanced options menu. Previously I could delete all cookies from a particular browsing experience rapidly. Now they delete in a few mb's at a time. Takes a minimum of 50 clicks to clear the cookie cache.
Unfortunately outside cookie cache cleaners do not seem to get at the excess cookies on Firefox. This is mildly troubling but has never been a problem until now. If it continues to be such an arduous process to clear my cache using the advanced settings option, I may have to revisit using an different browser for the bulk of my Internet experience.
Thanks for your time and support.
All Replies (2)
Actually Firefox stores cookies and cached web content completely separately, so let me address them in two different paragraphs:
(1) Clearing Cookies
If you want to remove cookies that ALL websites have set, you can use the Clear Recent History dialog. There is a "details" button to select only the categories of "history" that you want to remove. This article has more info on this dialog: Clear cookies and site data in Firefox (second bullet point in the article)
(2) Clearing Cache
The cache is a set of temp folders for page content. As you browse, the cache fills up, and then Firefox discards less used content to make space for the new content.
Several users have reported new problems in Firefox 45 with the "Clear Now" button on the Options/Preferences > Advanced > Network page. I don't think we've gotten to the bottom of what's going on with it.
In my testing, what seems to be happening is that the clearing is running in the background. If I reload the page, I can see the number going down, eventually to zero. Some users report it never reaches zero.
Next time you want to clear cache, could you click the Clear Now button once, then reload the page (Ctrl+Shift+r) every 5 seconds to see whether yours is also proceeding slowly in the background and when it stops?
Alternately, the "Clear Recent History" dialog mentioned in the article about clearing cookies also has cache as one of the categories it can clear. You might want to try that method to see whether it is more effective.
To see how many items are in the disk-based web content cache, and even what they are, you can use the following internal page: type or paste about:cache in the address bar and press Enter to load the page. The one you want to check is the Disk cache.
Boot the computer in Windows Safe mode with network support to see if that has effect in case security software is causing problems.