im bored of webbrowsers! advice would be appreciated, thanks

ninjaprawn · 2008-11-03 23:37:54

hi

over my last few years of linux, and loving it, i have had an ongoing battle with web browsers. basically, i cant find one that works properly for me! im not sure if im missing something, in arch i have foud swiftfox and opera best.

to give you an idea of what i am trying to achieve, the machine im on once upon a time ran windows xp pro, with firefox, and the browser did everything you expect from it. but firefox is extremely slow in linux. i have tried around 10 distros, and always had the same problem with browsers. they always feel slow n sluggish!

i have a couple of questions i wouldnt mind hearing other peeps opinion on;

1./ Safari and Wine? anyone using this combo succesfully, and any issues with it?
2./ is swiftfox the same as me optimising firefox myself?
3./ What browser are others using? i need all the usual multimedia stuff & plugins that you get with firefox & opera
4./ how is swiftfox uninstalled? completely!! including all settings and other things!
5./ how do i go about learning to optimise my own version of firefox? i dont want someone else to optimise it for me, i want to know how, so i can mess around!
6./ ive herd about flags for my processor when optimising apps. how do i find out info to tell me about flags on my celeron 1.8GHz??

sorry for all the questions, but everything else on my machine is perfect apart from this 1 issue! thanks again!

Gullible Jones · 2008-11-03 23:44:21

Have you tried disabling Pango for gecko-based browsers? Put "export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1" (without quotes) in your .bashrc, or in /etc/profile if you use GDM (which ignores .bashrc). This should improve the performance of Firefox significantly.

Procyon · 2008-11-03 23:48:48

Try out firefox spookyet

PGO really makes it faster.

MarCustomized · 2008-11-03 23:51:36

Use a text browser. I recommend Links and/or Elinks.

1. I wouldn't recommend using Wine with any web browser.
2. Swiftfox is pretty close to maximum optimization without you compiling it yourself.
3. I use Firefox 3 and Links [links-g].
4. If you use the PKGBUILD, just uninstall it as you would any other package, then delete the .mozilla folder in your home directory.
5. Google?
6. Read up on 'make' and 'makeflags', possibly 'gcc' too. Some stuff is in the man pages.

Gullible Jones wrote:

Have you tried disabling Pango for gecko-based browsers? Put "export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1" (without quotes) in your .bashrc, or in /etc/profile if you use GDM (which ignores .bashrc). This should improve the performance of Firefox significantly.

Damn. Just did this. Awesome!

Last edited by MarCustomized (2008-11-03 23:57:55)

ninjaprawn · 2008-11-04 00:04:22

thanks for the quick responses!

i have already disabled pango.
i will be trying spookyet's version first chance tomorrow, thanks
MarCustomized, thanks for that, i wont be using links, ive used it before and its not what im after, the rest brilliant. thanks for the input!!

Last edited by ninjaprawn (2008-11-04 00:05:21)

Hessiess · 2008-11-04 00:13:23

for optimising firefox, learn C and strip out everything you don't need..

froli · 2008-11-04 06:32:23

Procyon wrote:

Try out firefox spookyet
PGO really makes it faster.

Thanks, I installed it and it really makes a difference!

psilo357 · 2008-11-08 04:14:57

froli wrote:

Procyon wrote:
Try out firefox spookyet
PGO really makes it faster.
Thanks, I installed it and it really makes a difference!

So, is this firefox spookyet better than swiftfox? I am just now setting up a new install with kdemod, and was goign to put swiftfox on it, but noticed that there isn't a build for xeon quad core processors, its based off of core2 technology, but the closest was prescott...

thanks

ninjaprawn · 2008-11-08 09:01:54

Hessiess wrote:

for optimising firefox, learn C and strip out everything you don't need..

thanks, i will give that a try, ive been trying to find a reason to learn to program a new language. I lernt qb as a kid, and tried python about a year ago, but had no direction, project, or motivation to use or lern it!

ive been trying out WM's, so havent tried spookyets version of firefox! tried OB, but still prefer FB!

Cilyan · 2008-11-08 12:49:25

I'm currently testing midori. Also still a lot unstable, it is very fast, completely functional (java/flash/... everything works) and empty of heavy extra and useless features. It uses webkit. You could give it a try and if you want to learn a programming language, you could start with it, it is much more tiny and easy to access than firefox source code.

ezzetabi · 2008-11-08 15:27:07

What do you lose disabling Pango?

Cilyan · 2008-11-09 00:38:03

Pango is used for text rendering (through freetype2 for font I believe). So if the text is still OK after disabling it, then you have lost nothing

Execute_Method · 2008-11-09 02:26:21

What video card do you have?

I had to add this to my xorg.conf to REALLY fix the slowness (at least 10fold) of ALL web browsers (I tried them all like you, but I like Firefox so much, I kept looking and looking til I found a solution that worked). I know it works for ATI & Intel using mesa, but I think it also works for Nvidia.

Add this to the device section:

# fix slow web browsers
        Option       "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"

ninjaprawn · 2008-11-10 19:17:57

Execute_Method wrote:

What video card do you have?
I had to add this to my xorg.conf to REALLY fix the slowness (at least 10fold) of ALL web browsers (I tried them all like you, but I like Firefox so much, I kept looking and looking til I found a solution that worked). I know it works for ATI & Intel using mesa, but I think it also works for Nvidia.
Add this to the device section:
# fix slow web browsers
        Option       "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"

thanks for that, i have a Nvidia, and I've just popped that line into my xorg, had a little browse around, and it seems to have given a little boost!!! thanks!

smurnjiff · 2008-11-10 23:17:15

Execute_Method wrote:

What video card do you have?
I had to add this to my xorg.conf to REALLY fix the slowness (at least 10fold) of ALL web browsers (I tried them all like you, but I like Firefox so much, I kept looking and looking til I found a solution that worked). I know it works for ATI & Intel using mesa, but I think it also works for Nvidia.
Add this to the device section:
# fix slow web browsers
        Option       "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"

Read the discussion regarding this at http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/x … 35451.html.

Last edited by smurnjiff (2008-11-10 23:17:35)

Arch Linux

#1 2008-11-03 23:37:54

im bored of webbrowsers! advice would be appreciated, thanks

#2 2008-11-03 23:44:21

Re: im bored of webbrowsers! advice would be appreciated, thanks

#3 2008-11-03 23:48:48

Re: im bored of webbrowsers! advice would be appreciated, thanks

#4 2008-11-03 23:51:36

Re: im bored of webbrowsers! advice would be appreciated, thanks

#5 2008-11-04 00:04:22

Re: im bored of webbrowsers! advice would be appreciated, thanks

#6 2008-11-04 00:13:23

Re: im bored of webbrowsers! advice would be appreciated, thanks

#7 2008-11-04 06:32:23

Re: im bored of webbrowsers! advice would be appreciated, thanks

#8 2008-11-08 04:14:57

Re: im bored of webbrowsers! advice would be appreciated, thanks

#9 2008-11-08 09:01:54

Re: im bored of webbrowsers! advice would be appreciated, thanks

#10 2008-11-08 12:49:25

Re: im bored of webbrowsers! advice would be appreciated, thanks

#11 2008-11-08 15:27:07

Re: im bored of webbrowsers! advice would be appreciated, thanks

#12 2008-11-09 00:38:03

Re: im bored of webbrowsers! advice would be appreciated, thanks

#13 2008-11-09 02:26:21

Re: im bored of webbrowsers! advice would be appreciated, thanks

#14 2008-11-10 19:17:57

Re: im bored of webbrowsers! advice would be appreciated, thanks

#15 2008-11-10 23:17:15

Re: im bored of webbrowsers! advice would be appreciated, thanks

Board footer