Ditched Firefox - Sort Of. Gained... Speed And Stability !

[Thanh-BKK]

Hi.

So that stunt yesterday DID IT. I've about had it with Firefox for quite some time now - ever since an update looong time ago it was slow, VERY slow, in terms of startup and, even more annoyingly, shutdown.... so bad that after my CPU upgrade the computer effectively got too fast for Firefox and instead of simply shutting down with a 10-second delay it went "Do you want to force-quit?".

Then there was this "a script on this page is busy or stopped responding" whenever i used Thunderbird and received an e0-mail with a link in it. As 95% of my e-mails are from forums there are plenty of links. Clicking them generated the mentioned error or, if Firefox was already running, had them both "grey out" for considerable time.

But yesterday.... ok, i was on a site with pretty pictures. Right-click disabled, i know that. I know also that Firefox usually gets those pictures anyway. But yesterday.... trying that froze the whole session. Apart from the mouse pointer nothing moved. And i mean NOTHING, no terminal, no AWN, NOTHING. Had to push the reset button to get my computer back. And when i tried again it did it AGAIN.

Today i installed Swiftfox. A beta version but screw that (3.5 beta 4).

And all of the above problems are GONE. It works just like Firefox, even every single one of my extensions works perfectly with it. BUT.... the instant i click that launcher down there in AWN the thing is open. The moment i hit a link in an e-mail it is open. And the moment i click that red "X" in the top right corner - it's gone. And that is repeatable. I've opened and closed thousands of pages the last few hours.

And it DOES get the pretty pictures from that site! Right-click and immediately hit the "v" key (faster than that "right-click disabled" message can pop up) and you get the picture, no freeze.

So anyone out there who suffers from a sluggish Firefox in Ubuntu, give Swiftfox a spin. And if you like it as much as i do and maybe don't want to see the original one any more at all, but keep your custom icon without much fiddling - right-click said icon, "properties" and edit the command from "firefox %u" to "swiftfox %u" and you're all set. That works for AWN-launchers as well

Oh, by the way.... Firefox 2.0, 3.0 and Swiftfox can peacefully co-exist, i actually got them all three installed now and can start either one, but only one at a time as they all seem to use the same profile.

Kind regards.....

Thanh

[jackdanielsesq]

I have used FF for eons - its bulletproof. There might be something wrong with your FF installation or the O/S itself. That often happens when you install something that is outside your distro or repo.

I have only one issue with FF Linux edition and thats with DTA - it is way to resource intensive, but thats the nature of the build. I did the exact same XP + FF DTA ISO download and it was perfect. In fact, FDM is less resource intensive even. With 10 pipes running.

I saw FF3.5 today, but as nothing is wrong with mine and I dont need Alpha anything, same/same chrome, I decided against it.

The trouble with all these darn programs is they all have way too much bloat & bad code.

BR>Jack

[endure]

I don't know anything about the Linux version but the Windows version uses loads of memory. I'm using it now (admittedly with 10 tabs open) and it's using 480Mb.

[jackdanielsesq]

The issue is available RAM - as soon as the pagefile starts taking hits ya running into performance problems. I have about the same qty tabs, but it depends on what each is doing. DTA takes huge resources in Linux - must be code thingy - with all conditions being equal - XP was more efficient.

But, I dont us M$ over the net much - which is +80% - because of the bugs and performance hits.

FF has become bloated of late also of late.

BR>Jack

[Thanh-BKK]

Hi.

There's a ton of people complaining about Firefox 3.0 being very sluggish in Linux. Firefox 2.0 is lightning fast against it.... does "bloat" ring a bell..? Here on my Windows machine (at the office) i am using the 3.5 Beta since some time now and it is noticably faster and just more "agile" than 3.0.....

In the case of my Linux box it can't be "lack of RAM" as i have two gigabytes of the stuff and never use even a quarter of that, the page file (well "swap" in that case) is never used even the tiniest bit, except when i do video conversions. I haven't managed to fill that RAM with Firefox, not even with 50 tabs and/or windows open (and yes i DID test that, the highest i ever ran was 6 windows with 10 tabs each).

I also noticed that Swiftfox isn't that swift anymore - it was right after install and the hours that followed, however since i rebooted the machine for the first time it has become almost as sluggish as Firefox (and the T-Bird problem has re-occurred too) so i guess it MUST be something within the profile (the profile folder is some 180 megabytes large - most of which is offline cache, i might reduce that and try again). Still Swiftfox loads a LOT faster than Firefox, yet shuts down just as slow now.

I did a re-build of my experimental machine in the morning today (new mainboard and case) and noticed it there as well, and that's Firefox without anything, i.e. no add-ons etc, VERY sluggish. That's Ubuntu Jaunty. That machine has 2 gigs of RAM as well. And can't blame the graphics card because one is using Nvidia, the other ATI and the problem is on both

Best regards....

Thanh

[jackk]

Gnome default browser is Epiphany ( http://projects.gnome.org/epiphany/ ) which uses FF rendering engine but is much, much less bloated. It has adblock plugin, tabs etc and it's really 100% compatible to Gnome unlike FF. Same-same but better and lighter.

My wife uses FF 3.0, she connects to internet only twice a day to sanook website and lately I noticed that her FF profile has a "places.sqlite" file that is... 640Mb FF takes about 4 seconds to start and almost as much time to close it on a 2.5Ghz dualcore.