Firefox speed on Windows vs. Linux

AllTom · 2006-08-10 00:05:51

With Firefox, I can open 40+ page conversations and open/close individual messages as efficiently as in smaller conversations--in Windows. In Linux, these actions take several seconds and my CPU goes to 100%. Would it be possible for me to get Firefox running as efficiently in Arch as it does in Windows?

I have graphics acceleration.

Cerebral · 2006-08-10 00:15:01

Probably not as direct an answer as you were hoping for, but the sense of snappiness of firefox (among other apps) on Windows vs. Linux has been brought up and discussed before:

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=22034

user · 2006-08-10 02:39:09

It must be mentioned to describe Windows character,
it is good at graphic displaying with the help of non-free hardware sucking company like intel, nvidia, ati.(i.e. close help hardware-level or software-level in windows kernel, dll )
The almost of webbrowser's performance is just html rendering, it is related some graphic performance, rest thing is network performance (this is linux's area), so

linux ff: g(low)+n(high)
window ff: g(high)+n(middle,with the help of dirty unfair stolen freebsd-network stack, fucking BSD license)

PS: anyway IMPO, my linux ff: g(high)+n(high) or g(middle)+n(2xhigh)

AllTom · 2006-08-10 03:13:01

Cerebral wrote:

Probably not as direct an answer as you were hoping for, but the sense of snappiness of firefox (among other apps) on Windows vs. Linux has been brought up and discussed before:
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=22034

That was a recent thread, I'm not sure how I missed it. Thanks for the link. The first half-page of posts answer my question: the roots of the problem run deep.

Gullible Jones · 2006-08-10 12:14:10

user wrote:

linux ff: g(low)+n(high)

I'm pretty sure that's wrong. The OSS drivers for Intel, Unichrome, etc. graphics hardware seem to give pretty good performance, and nVidia's drivers perform extremely well.

Also, how fast your graphics card can draw stuff doesn't matter at all if your browser's rendering engine is ass-slow.

AllTom: Try putting

export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1

in /etc/profile, then logging out and logging back in again... Firefox seems to have some performance problems when using Pango.

(Firefox 2.0 beta 1 seems to perform as well with Pango as with XFT, though, which makes me wonder if the sluggish performance in 1.5.0.x is more the fault of Gecko itself than Pango.)

brazzmonkey · 2006-08-10 12:30:12

generally speaking, firefox is slow on linux (slow to launch, slow to browse). i already tried a few hacks like the one mentioned above ; some of them indeed sped things up a bit.
i eventually stopped using firefox - konqueror is now very good for web browsing, plus it's really faster and more responsive.
actually, appart from a few interesting extensions, i don't really see the point in using firefox anymore...

JGC · 2006-08-10 13:05:39

Try a browser like epiphany or xulrunner, those are faster than firefox because they don't have to emulate the GTK UI via XUL but draw native toolbars and dialogs instead.

Also, the pango disable hack as shown by Guillible Jones can speedup things quite well. Pango can be rather slow, though pango 1.14.0 together with cairo 1.2.2 will be a bit faster than the previous versions were (cairo 1.2.2 fixed quite some regressions, from which a few were pure performance regressions and some others were memleaks). Disabling pango will speed things up because it will use XFT then, but it will also have bugs in rendering unicode characters because XFT wasn't designed for anything else than western character sets.

One big difference between linux and windows when it comes to font rendering is that windows doesn't do AA by default, where linux does many font transformations on your rendered fonts. The fonts look better on linux IMHO, but performance is lower doing so.

test1000 · 2006-08-10 13:26:42

Maybe it's the x-server aswell. I'm sure that if you ran firefox on directfb it would go faster? I'm thinking of this article: http://jonsmirl.googlepages.com/graphics.html and all the layers that's needed, or maybe pango was supposed to alleviate that somewhat?

/me isn't sure.

Anyway. I'm using switftfox for my architecture in AUR though, and it seems to be much faster than i'd expected it to go compared to firefox.

So unless i'm having a major case of that drug that usually is just a sugar-pill but the doctors tells you that it's something else, but i can't remember the name of. THEN you should really try it out or try opera 9.01(not sure if latest ver is out in repos yet), that's as fast as in windows

Gullible Jones · 2006-08-10 15:48:42

test1000 wrote:

Maybe it's the x-server aswell. I'm sure that if you ran firefox on directfb it would go faster? I'm thinking of this article: http://jonsmirl.googlepages.com/graphics.html and all the layers that's needed, or maybe pango was supposed to alleviate that somewhat?
/me isn't sure.

I doubt it, the X server may still be a bit bloated but it's pretty fast.

JGC wrote:

ango can be rather slow, though pango 1.14.0 together with cairo 1.2.2 will be a bit faster than the previous versions were (cairo 1.2.2 fixed quite some regressions, from which a few were pure performance regressions and some others were memleaks).

Eh, that's not what I'm seeing. Galeon in Pango mode is still quite slow with the new version. As I mentioned before, having seen Firefox 2's performance, I wonder if slow performance when using Pango is a Gecko problem.

AllTom · 2006-08-20 01:34:57

Gullible Jones wrote:

AllTom: Try putting
export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1
in /etc/profile, then logging out and logging back in again... Firefox seems to have some performance problems when using Pango.

This may have improved things slightly, but Firefox still isn't exactly responsive on such long pages.

syd · 2006-08-20 13:16:12

Just:

pacman -S opera

And problem solved

stonecrest · 2006-08-20 15:43:35

syd wrote:

Just:
pacman -S opera
And problem solved

Weird, I tried that and got a huge number of more problems. My firefox plugins no longer work, the interface won't customize the way I want it, and the menus are ugly. I also find that some websites don't render correctly.

/me who hates smug responses like syd's

Dusty · 2006-08-20 15:49:12

There's also swiftfox in AUR. Its still firefox, but for some reason, the optimizations make it seem substantially faster. Or maybe its placebo effect.

Dusty

syd · 2006-08-21 05:21:06

stonecrest wrote:

syd wrote:
Just:
pacman -S opera
And problem solved
Weird, I tried that and got a huge number of more problems. My firefox plugins no longer work, the interface won't customize the way I want it, and the menus are ugly. I also find that some websites don't render correctly.
/me who hates smug responses like syd's

lol, Yer i know opera is not without its problems.
I swap between ff and opera, month on, month off type of thing. Opera is a bit quicker but it doesn't display pages as well as ff.

Arch Linux

#1 2006-08-10 00:05:51

Firefox speed on Windows vs. Linux

#2 2006-08-10 00:15:01

Re: Firefox speed on Windows vs. Linux

#3 2006-08-10 02:39:09

Re: Firefox speed on Windows vs. Linux

#4 2006-08-10 03:13:01

Re: Firefox speed on Windows vs. Linux

#5 2006-08-10 12:14:10

Re: Firefox speed on Windows vs. Linux

#6 2006-08-10 12:30:12

Re: Firefox speed on Windows vs. Linux

#7 2006-08-10 13:05:39

Re: Firefox speed on Windows vs. Linux

#8 2006-08-10 13:26:42

Re: Firefox speed on Windows vs. Linux

#9 2006-08-10 15:48:42

Re: Firefox speed on Windows vs. Linux

#10 2006-08-20 01:34:57

Re: Firefox speed on Windows vs. Linux

#11 2006-08-20 13:16:12

Re: Firefox speed on Windows vs. Linux

#12 2006-08-20 15:43:35

Re: Firefox speed on Windows vs. Linux

#13 2006-08-20 15:49:12

Re: Firefox speed on Windows vs. Linux

#14 2006-08-21 05:21:06

Re: Firefox speed on Windows vs. Linux

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