Mozilla cache folder

Due to my UNIX background,  I’ve found it helpful, for both security and performance reasons to relocate your ‘cache’ or temporary files to a new location (Unix/Linux gurus may prefer /tmp/) here’s the simple process for doing this on a Windows machine using Firefox.

This is useful for several reasons:

* Moving many of your ‘tmp’ files/folders to a single location makes it easier to “clean house”.
* If you move ‘tmp’ to a separate drive or partition (like in UNIX), your primary drive will be less fragmented and may even show increased performance.

Firefox didn’t make this as easy to change as MSIE, but it’s a trivial matter. Find and edit the prefs.js file in your Profile directory and add the following…

user_pref(“browser.cache.disk.parent_directory”, “C:\\temp\\Mozilla”);

Alternately, you can type “about:config” in the URL/address line of the browser and add the String…

browser.cache.disk.parent_directory with a value of “C:\\temp\\Mozilla”

If you want to keep your existing cached files, you can always copy them over from the old location.

For Windows XP with MSIE6/7, the disk cache location is easily changed in the Internet Control Panel, on the General tab, Settings button. Microsoft seems to change that control panel with every new OS/browser version, but it’s generally named similarly on different configurations.

Good luck !