Epiphany much faster than Firefox??

[jdong]

I've been noticing phenomenal, Opera-like speeds with Epiphany 1.8.0 in Breezy.

When viewing long threads on the Forums, Firefox sometimes deadlocks for 1.5 seconds while rendering the page, sometimes even more. Note that this is on an athlon64 3000+ with 1.5GB RAM; not a slow system on any scale! Also, I've seen poor graphical performance with Firefox, even with the UI. Javascript alert() dialogs pop up a window border immediately, but it takes another second or two for the text and buttons to show up -- unacceptable on modern equipment like mine.


Epiphany doesn't suffer from these issues. The forums load nearly instantly; and even when they don't, I can still browse in other tabs -- the UI isn't frozen.


I'm currently comparing for a difference in the two browsers. They are using the same Gecko versions, same GCC compile flags...



It might be extensions; I'll try a clean profile and report back.

[jdong]

Alright, fresh profile, Scrags rendering time test (http://scragz.com/tech/mozilla/test-rendering-time.php) of:


Firefox: 4.60
Epiphany: 2.42


Both browsers were given 5 refreshes each running from the hard drive, and were awarded the lowest they got. Epiphany is nearly twice as fast as Firefox at just raw computational rendering...


Why is this?

[jdong]

The official builds (Deer Park and 1.0.6) both render in the 2.10-2.30 second area, with Deer park taking the lead (as one'd expect).


However, why exactly is Breezy's Firefox so slow?!?

[majikstreet]

Jdong,
I have experienced something out of the ordinary on my system

SysInfo: uname: Linux 2.6.12-8-686 CPU: Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.20GHz 2193.131 MHz Bogomips: 4341.76 Mem: 85/250M [||||||||||] Diskspace: 54.30G Free: 43.00G Procs: 63 Uptime: 6 hrs 41 mins 26 secs Load: 0.53 1.04 1.17  | Screen: Intel Corp. 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 03) Screen Resolution: 1024x768 (24 bpp) wlan0: In: 116.12M Out: 9.33M

It takes a veeeeeeeeeeeeeery long time for epiphany to load. I have breezy by the way and I installed epiphany from the repo's...

They guy's on #epiphany on freenode have NO idea whatsoever.


majikstreet

[jdong]

Hmm, it takes a few seconds to launch Epiphany on cold boot, and it launches nearly instantly subsequenly. You have a fairly decent amount of RAM, so that's probably not it....


What's a "veeeeery long time"? What if you set the startup page to about:blank?

[poofyhairguy]

You need to prelink Epiphany.

Epiphany loads pages faster, with less CPU power used and uses less RAM overall compared to Firefox in Linux. Firefox in Linux is kinda a lame dog- its the slowest out of the Windows, Linux,OSX versions. When I know I'm going to open a lot of tabs or such (like when I researching) I always use Epiphany.

The rest of the time I use Firefox and I don't know why when its so much worse. I'm like and adict or something. I don't even adblock anymore so I don't need it. Truth be told if I could theme Epiphany to look like Firefox (or all some Gnome search bar) I would use it full time.

[poofyhairguy]

Why is this?

Because the most active version of Firefox is the Windows one. It gets the love.

[Orunitia]

I also just started using Epiphany on Breezy. It is a LOT faster than firefox, and it's not as ugly as opera.

[bored2k]

You need to prelink Epiphany.

Epiphany loads pages faster, with less CPU power used and uses less RAM overall compared to Firefox in Linux. Firefox in Linux is kinda a lame dog- its the slowest out of the Windows, Linux,OSX versions. When I know I'm going to open a lot of tabs or such (like when I researching) I always use Epiphany.

The rest of the time I use Firefox and I don't know why when its so much worse. I'm like and adict or something. I don't even adblock anymore so I don't need it. Truth be told if I could theme Epiphany to look like Firefox (or all some Gnome search bar) I would use it full time.

I use Smart Bookmars. In my humble opinion they work better than the Firefox search bar. I can type directly in the location bar and I get to search wherever I want from (Wikipedia, google, ___nova, IMDB, wherever I want from). Add to that the no toolbar option and I am a happing epiphaner.

[jdong]

Because the most active version of Firefox is the Windows one. It gets the love.

Hmm, well, it's the same Gecko rendering engine, compiled with the same compiler and the same everything. Did you see my comment about official Firefox? It's faster, and actually compiled with GCC 3.3... Has GCC 4.0 really gotten that messed up?


Users of other distros, is there this significant of a difference between Firefox and Epiphany/Galeon?



There's certainly some sites that set off Firefox's slowness -- Slashdot does it on autoscroll, and the Forums does it. Since I visit the forums the most, that's kind of concerning.



Either way, I don't remember seeing THIS kind of speed gap back in Hoary days. I still feel it's abnormal.