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Whose idea was LZ4?

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  • Last reply by cor-el

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I would like to have a conversation with the developer who had the brilliant idea of applying LZ4 to the formerly plain text session backup files that were used since the beginning and worked perfectly fine.

What is the name of the person whose idea it was to add a “feature” to Firefox that made recovering lost sessions so much easier and saving 3 MB of my disk space for wasting over 100 minutes of my time figuring out how to handle LZ4 works and how to get the plain text that would normally be written directly to the disk after Firefox failed to recover the session after a crash and after file system readability problems?

And did the community explicitly ask for LZ4? Were there users of Mozilla Firefox that recommended LZ4? Who exactly had the idea of implementing LZ4?

Will places.sqlitelz4 (or “places.sqlite.lz4”) become the next victim of lz4?

Thanks in advance.

I would like to have a conversation with the developer who had the brilliant idea of applying LZ4 to the formerly plain text session backup files that were used since the beginning and worked perfectly fine. What is the name of the person whose idea it was to add a “feature” to Firefox that made recovering lost sessions so much easier and saving 3 MB of my disk space for wasting over 100 minutes of my time figuring out how to handle LZ4 works and how to get the plain text that would normally be written directly to the disk after Firefox failed to recover the session after a crash and after file system readability problems? And did the community explicitly ask for LZ4? Were there users of Mozilla Firefox that recommended LZ4? Who exactly had the idea of implementing LZ4? Will places.sqlitelz4 (or “places.sqlite.lz4”) become the next victim of lz4? Thanks in advance.
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Whom created those images?

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Hi,

The people who answer questions here, for the most part, are other Firefox users volunteering their time (like me), not Mozilla employees or Firefox developers.

If you want to leave feedback for Firefox developers, you can go to the Firefox Help menu and select Submit Feedback... or use this link. Your feedback gets collected by a team of people who read it and gather data about the most common issues.

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LZ4 compression is only used for backup files (bookmarks) and files that are more of less static (i.e. they aren't updated all time) like sessionstore files and a few other files that only need to be read on startup. LZ4 is used in such a case to speedup starting and closing Firefox (i.e. less data needs to be written or read). SQLite databases like places.sqlite can't be compressed because they need to be updated all the time.