History view is slow to load with a large amount of records

What happened:
The history view takes many seconds (between 8-9 seconds on mako) to load when it has a large number of records (I currently have 4640 records).

What I expected to happen:
For the view to load in a reasonable amount of time, by either only showing recent entries or trimming the db. Other browsers only show the history for today/yesterday in the initial view and then have buttons to show older history.

Note: that when testing multiple windows, if one window is looking at the history view and the other navigates to page it blocks the UI for a few seconds as the history view is being updated.

$ apt-cache policy webbrowser-app
webbrowser-app:
  Installed: 0.23+15.04.20160912-0ubuntu1
  Candidate: 0.23+15.04.20160912-0ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 0.23+15.04.20160912-0ubuntu1 0
       1003 http://ppa.launchpad.net/ci-train-ppa-service/landing-084/ubuntu/ vivid/main armhf Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     0.23+15.04.20160825-0ubuntu1 0
       1001 http://ppa.launchpad.net/ci-train-ppa-service/stable-phone-overlay/ubuntu/ vivid/main armhf Packages
     0.23+15.04.20150416-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ vivid/main armhf Packages

$ system-image-cli -i
current build number: 398
device name: mako
channel: ubuntu-touch/rc-proposed/bq-aquaris.en
last update: 2016-09-12 15:18:40
version version: 398
version ubuntu: 20160910
version device: 20160401.1
version custom: 20160904-9-vivid