Firefox performance.

dahamsta

I run Firefox on and off, but I tried it there for a week solid and it got increasingly more annoying as I went on. In particular, I found it rather slow compared to Avant/IE, which really goes against everything I've heard about the Gecko rendering engine. Am I missing a tweak or summat?

adam

tribble

Yeah - I'm using it (not right now).

Don't like it's support for CSS.

Feels uni-threaded, ie if you open a link in a new tab in the background the forground (parent) freezes momentarily.

No "Go" button a la IE - I have to resort to the keyboard more.
(At least i can right click the address bar and paste links - can't do that in opera)

I'm sure I'll tink of some more

tribble

Creamy Goodness

nope you just need to use it more once you do it gets faster honestly

i've cached a site in IE and firefox then when back to them and firefox opened in less than a second and IE took 2-3 seconds :S

dahamsta

Originally posted by tribble
Feels uni-threaded, ie if you open a link in a new tab in the background the forground (parent) freezes momentarily.

Yeah, I get that too. Avant performs much better, which is weird because of course IE wasn't build with tabbed browsing in mind.

No "Go" button a la IE - I have to resort to the keyboard more.

Actually there is tribble -- right-click on the toolbar, choose Customise from the menu and you'll see a Go button. Just drag it to wherever you want it on the toolbar. There's no Search button either though, except as an extension, and I find too many extensions can confuse the crap out of Firefox.

(At least i can right click the address bar and paste links - can't do that in opera)

Don't like Opera at all, but yeah, they all have their little quirks.

Originally posted by Cr3m0
nope you just need to use it more once you do it gets faster honestly

That sounds a little odd tbh.

i've cached a site in IE and firefox then when back to them and firefox opened in less than a second and IE took 2-3 seconds :S

I don't get that either, but I do run Squid locally so that might be a factor.

adam

robbie1876

Feels uni-threaded, ie if you open a link in a new tab in the background the forground (parent) freezes momentarily.

For some reason the site I notice this the most on is boards.ie. I know nothing about the inner workings of Firefox, but maybe someone can explain why this happens on boards and if there's any tweak to fix it.

Thanks

nadir

yea i have the same problem, it really sucks, im using firefox in linux too, it should work fine, but i find it starts to slow down very quickly, im getting pissed off with it, and I think im going to move to galleon or soething else soon.

dahamsta

This is likely caused by the menus robbie, I reported the problem some time ago in Feedback/Support. If this is the problem affecting you, the only real solution is to install some kind of proxy than can filter on URLs (as against hostnames) -- I have AdZapper running on my Smoothwall box to kill the menus. Of course you lose the convenience of the menus, but you get used to it.

Obviously you can do it by disabling scripting too, but it's a pain in the arse turning it off and on just for Boards.

adam

nadir

i get the problem with other sites too, although it is particurly heavy with boards. Firefox has crashed a few times aswell, or just became so slow i had to kill it. It really should be able to handle the laod.

robbie1876

Thanks adam. I turned off Javascript and to be honest didn't notice a big difference at all. What I tend to do is use the middle mouse button 3 or 4 times in quick succession to open threads in new tabs. After each click, there is a 'freeze' of about a second and a half before it will let me click the next thread etc. This doesn't happen when say opening pages from google. Do you still think it's related to the menus?

Robbie

dahamsta

Naw Robbie, I doubt it. If it was excusively the menus the performance should have improved significantly.

Middle-click doesn't work for me cos I have it set up as double-click at the Windows level and I never tried to set an exception for Firefox. Anyone else getting this problem or should Robbie try a reinstall or summat?

adam

maxheadroom

Originally posted by robbie1876
Thanks adam. I turned off Javascript and to be honest didn't notice a big difference at all. What I tend to do is use the middle mouse button 3 or 4 times in quick succession to open threads in new tabs. After each click, there is a 'freeze' of about a second and a half before it will let me click the next thread etc. This doesn't happen when say opening pages from google. Do you still think it's related to the menus?

Robbie

I think each time you open up a tab, it does a DNS lookup and won't proceed until it resolves. This seems to hang the rest of the browser. I'm also pretty sure theres a bug logged on it somewhere. (These problems would probably get a better response over on the mozillazine forums though - thats where the real experts are...)

slartibardfast

if your after a bit extra performance use a firefox build with compiler optimizations for your CPU, can make a difference with things like threading.

As I can't go around recommending gentoo on the windows board, lol here are my fav ones:

http://scragz.com/tech/mozilla/builds

For P4: Get 07 SSE2
For AXP: Get 07 SSE
etc.

Warning pick the wrong one and it will crash/or act weird

dahamsta

Interesting. I run an AMD Thunderbird and I've found it a little kooky with a couple of things in the past, most notably Mandrake Linux installations.

adam

slartibardfast

sse with a thunderbird would make things crazy!!!

mandrake p111 binaries if they were being used would screw things up alright. AMD first got SSE with the athlon4 notebook chip which became the palmino axp chip later.

the straight O7's should be good to go!

ando

Feels uni-threaded, ie if you open a link in a new tab in the background the forground (parent) freezes momentarily.

thats the only complaint I have for Avant. I never really like Firefox, too slow starting up and glitchy in general. i only used it for the tabs feature

sceptre

Originally posted by tribble
(At least i can right click the address bar and paste links - can't do that in opera)

Don't know what version of Opera you're running but I can "Paste" or "Paste and Go" (very handy) in Opera.


(off-topic reply for the thread though, apologies)

ai ing

I use firefox at home, college and every computer I'm on.
But it is true that boards is on of the few sites that consistently seems to make firefox freeze when opening new tabs . Can be really annoying

Emboss

I haven't read through much of this

so sorry if it's been posted

take a look at

http://texturizer.net/firefox/tips.html#oth_rendering

p

Originally posted by tribble
Yeah - I'm using it (not right now).

Don't like it's support for CSS.

You don't like the best support for CSS available?


Anyway, to the original poster. It seems very odd. Firefox is as fast as IE for me on all machines i've tried it on, and I use it on alot of PCs. Start-up isn't quite as fast, because of the whole embedded IE thing, but overall it's as fast.

There's a good forum over on mozillazine, maybe there's something in the archives about it.

nadir

Originally posted by slartibardfast
if your after a bit extra performance use a firefox build with compiler optimizations for your CPU, can make a difference with things like threading.

As I can't go around recommending gentoo on the windows board, lol here are my fav ones:

http://scragz.com/tech/mozilla/builds

For P4: Get 07 SSE2
For AXP: Get 07 SSE
etc.

Warning pick the wrong one and it will crash/or act weird

I am running it ongentoo, and its slow. any ideas on how to improve performance?

maxheadroom

Which package did you install (mozilla-firefox or mozilla-firefox-bin)? What're your USE flags and CXX flags?

slartibardfast

what build flags are you using?

Personally I am very conservative with this:
"-O2 -march=athlon-xp -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
although many people go nutz!

I also prelink:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/prelink-howto.xml

and I build from cvs about once a week with:
http://breakmygentoo.net/ebuilds/mozilla-firefox-cvs-final.tar.bz2

apologies to all the scared windows folks!

nadir

im using CFLAGS="-O3 -mcpu=i686 -pipe"
its a dual p3 1ghz, but i also have the same problem on the other box which is a p4, anyways, thanks, ill try to recompile with different use flags.

Sorry for bringing this up in the windows forum btw.