I have Firefox on two machines side-by-side right now, one running Ubuntu 8.10 and the other running Windows XP, and Firefox runs extremely fast on the Ubuntu machine and extremely slow on the Windows one. I admit the machine running Ubuntu has a faster CPU, but the freezing and lagging you describe are and have always been Windows-related problems for me, and I have had none of them on the Ubuntu machine at all. Perhaps you are using an older version of Ubuntu, like 8.04?
On Tue, 2009-03-31 at 21:02 +0100, ubuntu-uk-requ...@lists.ubuntu.com wrote: > Message: 8 > Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2009 19:52:23 +0100 > From: Jai Harrison <j...@jaiharrison.com> > Subject: [ubuntu-uk] Firefox, Swiftfox and Swiftweasel > To: British Ubuntu Talk <ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com> > Message-ID: > <37eeeb790903311152o36ef84c0l640b95400b400...@mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 > > 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/
