Hey everyone, I've been experiencing some issues with Firefox lately (freezing during general use, lagging during Flash video playback, etc.). So I looked into it and it appears that the binary provided in Ubuntu for Firefox doesn't use some special compiler/compile method that is used on the Windows binaries. Next I found Swiftfox but because it is proprietary software I continued to search the web until I came across Swiftweasel (which is AFAIK the same thing but without the Firefox branding).
Unfortunately the latest *.deb provided is for version 3.0.3 (there have been numerous security patches since then) and the tar.gz along with instructions for 3.0.8 does not appear to work on Ubuntu (I've tried it). So I've been using Swiftweasel 3.0.3 lately and didn't notice much difference which led me to believe that my Firefox profile might have been damaged by an extension or simply have gotten crowded over the years. Thus I created a new profile but when trying to install Google Gears in Swiftweasel it wouldn't acknowledge installation on any Gears enabled websites. So I copied my profile over to Firefox and got Gears to work in that now leaving me running a newish profile under Firefox with a few questions. 1) How much better will the performance be from Swiftweasel? Is it worth migrating this profile back to the browser with the understanding that Gears will probably work now it's been installed? As such should I spend further time trying to get the Firefox 3.0.8 tar.gz to work in Ubuntu or just settle for 3.0.3 knowing there is exposed security flaws in it? 2) How come Firefox is so slow on GNU/Linux anyway? I've been looking at threads on the Ubuntu forums where people go as far as to say that Firefox is as much as twice as fast on Windows XP. Surely someone inside Canonical will compile Firefox using the same compiling technique as used with Windows if that is what's causing the problem. Otherwise how come that a FOSS browser is slower on the most open platform OS when the majority of its users on said platform are developers? I have an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU (2MB Cache) T5750 @ 2.00GHz along with 2GB of RAM (over half of which isn't being used). This doesn't seem to be a question of insufficient hardware to me. I await your replies, Jai "Venko" -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
