I like Linux but....

[mariane_08]

Yes I like Linux a lot. I've been using Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy and apart from a bit of tweaking to get the WiFi drivers funtioning on my laptop I've been enjoying it.

But... the one thing I'm not too impressed with is the slower web page speed in Firefox. I've still got a dual boot and when I switch back to Windows XP, IE7 is noticeably faster. I'm wondering if its actually Firefox or is it the network manager or something similar making things slowere.

I even tried these tweaks that were recomended to me to speed things up:
Speed Up Firefox web browser -- Ubuntu Geek
However, they seemed to make it even slower!

I'm curious to hear other peoples experience and perspectives on all this. Is this a common problem or just something I've done wrong?

Mariane

[Cabhan]

I have heard that Firefox on Linux is actually slower than Firefox on Windows. I don't know the exact reason.

Comparing Firefox to IE is a little difficult. Microsoft actually preloads a lot of IE's components with the rest of Windows, so opening IE doesn't need to do as much work as opening Firefox does. Having said that, you shouldn't be using IE even on Windows.

[techieMoe]

I don't notice any speed difference between IE and Firefox, but things like this are pretty much personal interpretation. I know some people feel that certain desktop environments or Linux distributions are "slow." However, the point Cabhan makes is a good one; Internet Exploiter uses a lot of the Windows system internal processes that stay resident in memory so it doesn't have to really do a fresh startup every time like Firefox.

[mariane_08]

I don't notice any speed difference between IE and Firefox, but things like this are pretty much personal interpretation. I know some people feel that certain desktop environments or Linux distributions are "slow." However, the point Cabhan makes is a good one; Internet Exploiter uses a lot of the Windows system internal processes that stay resident in memory so it doesn't have to really do a fresh startup every time like Firefox.

Well I've played with this a bit more and googled around a bit. Fasterfox maybe an option and there are some so called "tweaks" too.

What I've come to realise is that it's not really slow per se. It depends upon the site. Theres one site I ocassionally use which is the worse and sums up my problem. It takes time to load the various parts of the page and in particular the embedded music player takes simply ages to load and sometimes not completely loading at all. Other sites are much better.

I'm using Firefox 3.b5 which came packaged with Hardy. Maybe later versions will be better?
I also looked around for other browser options too but doesnt seem to be a definative answer on this either (other than Operea may be faster?) So I'll stick with Firefox and try and tweak it

Mariane

[bigtomrodney]

I had this problema few year back. Ultimately it appeared to be a DNS problem. I can't say why but my router just wasn't working as well with Linux when resolving names. I setup the OpenDNS addresses on my local PC to bypass it altogether and that made a big difference. Check it out:

OpenDNS | Providing A Safer And Faster Internet

[i92guboj]

I think that mariane_08 is not talking about the startup time or the time it takes to resolve DNSs.

It's a fact, and not a matter of personal interpretation, that firefox exhibits some very annoying (and longstanding by the way) bugs. For example, you will suffer horrid scroll performance when a site has a floating layer over a background that has the background:fixed; property in css. That one is nasty and has been around for quite a long time. If my memory serves correctly, it as already there in 2.x, and it still remains the same.

Oh, and my favorite. If someone uses mldonkey and manages it via the web interface s/he will be delighted on how *awfully* it performs (burning your cpu in flames in the way).

It's not gecko, that's for sure. Because neither flock, nor seamonkey, nor any other gecko browser that I've tried has this problem. I've reported it by the way some time ago, but received no feedback at all.

Firefox has a wide assortment of problems. In linux, when we speak about web browsers, I think that the only thing you can do is to choose the less bad one amongst a bunch of buggy browsers, unless you can live with text based browsers, then you have many interesting options, and of a very good quality.

[techieMoe]

It's a fact, and not a matter of personal interpretation, that firefox exhibits some very annoying (and longstanding by the way) bugs. For example...

Bugs are one thing. Nowhere that I see did the original poster mention bugs. We're talking about how fast something feels. That's 100% personal interpretation.

Firefox has a wide assortment of problems. In linux, when we speak about web browsers, I think that the only thing you can do is to choose the less bad one amongst a bunch of buggy browsers, unless you can live with text based browsers, then you have many interesting options, and of a very good quality.

Wow, I have to wonder what browsers you're using. I've never run into any show-stopping bugs in Firefox, Opera, or Galeon. Konqueror, yes, but still not enough to make me want to go back to the console.

[i92guboj]

Bugs are one thing. Nowhere that I see did the original poster mention bugs. We're talking about how fast something feels. That's 100% personal interpretation.

Fair enough.

Wow, I have to wonder what browsers you're using. I've never run into any show-stopping bugs in Firefox, Opera, or Galeon. Konqueror, yes, but still not enough to make me want to go back to the console.

I have just described a couple of them in firefox (and yes, they are showstoppers because I can't use these sites without my cpu going to a crawl). I could describe similar things for every browser out there (seamonkey is relatively bug free though), that ranges from unusable sites to random segfault (on sane hardware and stable systems). But I don't see how that would help this thread.

Konqueror is particularly unstable depending on the version you use (and I am not even talking about 4.x, that's food for another thread ). That's beside other problems, like the javascript stuff.

[techieMoe]

I have just described a couple of them in firefox (and yes, they are showstoppers because I can't use these sites without my cpu going to a crawl). I could describe similar things for every browser out there (seamonkey is relatively bug free though), that ranges from unusable sites to random segfault (on sane hardware and stable systems). But I don't see how that would help this thread.

Fair enough.

[mariane_08]

Bugs are one thing. Nowhere that I see did the original poster mention bugs. We're talking about how fast something feels. That's 100% personal interpretation.



Wow, I have to wonder what browsers you're using. I've never run into any show-stopping bugs in Firefox, Opera, or Galeon. Konqueror, yes, but still not enough to make me want to go back to the console.

Its not about how "it feels". For me FF3 is rally slower in Hardy than I'd like it to be. From reading around I've come to the conclusion that just the way it is and I'll just have to add what tweks I can. I hope that maybe future releases may improve the situation. Like I wonder about Hardy 9.04 perhaps?

Funny thing is I'm not sure it was always like this but I can really quantify the situation. I initially had Hardy installed and all was fine (I think anyway) Then decided to switch to Intrepid and FF seemed so slow, messed around for a couple of weeks and and went back to Hardy which now seems slower than it used to be (web browsing that is). I cant quantify very well because I moved location during all this which screws up any compare. All I know now is it's FF3 in Hardy is slower than in Windows XP. But I'll live with it for now.

I wonder what SeaMonkeys like? I've never tried it.