Browser cache

[dops7107]

Fellow Mac people,

I think I have pretty much got the hang of this Mac lark, and glad I've made the switch. But a few things still elude me.

I use Firefox mostly. When I see Quicktime movies in the browser, I sometimes want to keep them. Quicktime Pro allows you to save them directly, but I know in Windows you could just fish them out of the cache. Where do these files live on OS X? Sometimes I want to clean out the big files as they tend to take up a lot of space if they accumulate. I can clear it maunally from Firefox prefs, but I'm curious and want to see the files themselves...

 

[mklos]

They should be in the preferences folder inside your home folder. So the path is:

yourhd/Users/yourusername/Library/Preferences

Then in either a folder called Firefox, or Mozilla. There should be a cache folder in there somewhere.

 

[mkrishnan]

They should be in the preferences folder inside your home folder. So the path is:

yourhd/Users/yourusername/Library/Preferences

Then in either a folder called Firefox, or Mozilla. There should be a cache folder in there somewhere.

AFAIK, the firefox cache is actually not in this location, but instead is in:

/Users/(you)/library/application support/firefox/profiles/(xxx).default/cache

The folder inside profiles will be different for each individual. If you're a single user, there's probably only one in there. In any event, it will be a strange string of characters ending in .default.

But the problem is that in this folder, cached items are renamed with arbitrary names and no suffix. So although you can guess based on size, it'll be a bit of a nuisance.

Quicktime actually has its own cache in the ~/library/caches/quicktime/ folder, but I'm not sure which cache stores what you want.

 

[dops7107]

Thanks for your replies.

Found the Firefox cache in the location you suggested mkrishnan, and as you say the files are not user-friendly! Ditto with the Quicktime cache: the files can't be opened by quicktime even thought their size is of the right order for a movie. What a waste of space this stuff must take! Do you think it can be deleted safely?

 

[mkrishnan]

Thanks for your replies.

Found the Firefox cache in the location you suggested mkrishnan, and as you say the files are not user-friendly! Ditto with the Quicktime cache: the files can't be opened by quicktime even thought their size is of the right order for a movie. What a waste of space this stuff must take! Do you think it can be deleted safely?

I am fairly certain you can delete almost anything in the cache folder with impunity. But make a temp folder somewhere (e.g. desktop), drag all the caches you want to delete there, and then run the program in question. If it works, then delete the temp folder.

If you want to get movies back out of FF, unless there's a website on it, my best guess is to look for a large file in the cache folder from the right timeframe, and then rename it to end in the QT suffix.