Why are certain pages like this so slow in Firefox?

[hotweiss]

http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=964

Why are certain pages like this so slow in Firefox? It seems that you need a Pentium 10,000 to scroll through the page.

I'm using Firefox 3.

[cardinals_fan]

It's because it's a long page. Still works fine in Opera though :)

[RiceMonster]

I use firefox. It scrolls just fine for me. Use Page Up/Dn if you think it's too slow.

[mrgnash]

It's rather puzzling. I find that the following sites (not just pages, so it has nothing to do with length) are quite sluggish for me: Neurologica Blog (http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php) and Oliver Kamm (http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/).

[Can+~]

Talking about that, here's "The World's Highest Website":

http://worlds-highest-website.com/#pos1

[hotweiss]

Talking about that, here's "The World's Highest Website":

http://worlds-highest-website.com/#pos1

It actually scrolls fine here...

[hotweiss]

It's rather puzzling. I find that the following sites (not just pages, so it has nothing to do with length) are quite sluggish for me: Neurologica Blog (http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php) and Oliver Kamm (http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/).

Yes exactly. The two sites that you provided exhibit the same slow behavior! Those are simple sites....

[hanzomon4]

Try facebook, it's god awful. It's just the linux of version firefox however. Which sucks because it's almost perfect. Does this happen on other distros besides Ubuntu?

[FuturePilot]

It's rather puzzling. I find that the following sites (not just pages, so it has nothing to do with length) are quite sluggish for me: Neurologica Blog (http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php) and Oliver Kamm (http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/).

It's something really weird with the background images that those sites use. If you adblock them and reload the page it's really fast.

Same goes for the site in the OP's post.

[Can+~]

It's something really weird with the background images that those sites use. If you adblock them and reload the page it's really fast.

Same goes for the site in the OP's post.

You're right.

Looks like the problem resides in the background attachment method (fixed). Fixed attachment makes images (or anything in fact) look like they stay on the same place when scrolling.

[reyfer]

There must be something wrong with my Firefox, every page and site mentioned here loads and scrolls fast, fast, fast on my machine.....what's wrong with my Firefox?

[EdThaSlayer]

Maybe

a)You have TONS of tabs open
b)Have a slow computer...
c) Just unlucky-and firefox has become a memory hog for you by now


It works alright with me!
And I have a single core AMD Athlon 64 3000+ processor. :confused:

[FuturePilot]

I think it might have more to do with the graphics card than the CPU. I'm wondering if it has something to do with 2D rendering and some drivers. Or maybe even just if you have an older card.
I have an old GeForce 2 Go and scrolling on those sites is painful.

[hotweiss]

Maybe

a)You have TONS of tabs open
b)Have a slow computer...
c) Just unlucky-and firefox has become a memory hog for you by now


It works alright with me!
And I have a single core AMD Athlon 64 3000+ processor. :confused:

a) no tabs open
b) I have a Core 2 Duo overclocked at 3.8 GHz.
c) happens on every install

[hanzomon4]

Maybe

a)You have TONS of tabs open
b)Have a slow computer...
c) Just unlucky-and firefox has become a memory hog for you by now


It works alright with me!
And I have a single core AMD Athlon 64 3000+ processor. :confused:

a)no
b)no
c)no

It's only certain sites, for me only facebook. It's not the sites though cause they work with other browsers even firefox on OSX.

[hotweiss]

I think it might have more to do with the graphics card than the CPU. I'm wondering if it has something to do with 2D rendering and some drivers. Or maybe even just if you have an older card.
I have an old GeForce 2 Go and scrolling on those sites is painful.

I have a Nvidia 8800GT overclocked at 700 MHz.

[FuturePilot]

I have a Nvidia 8800GT overclocked at 700 MHz.

Ok maybe not :p
I know the Nvidia drivers never have been too great at 2D rendering, perhaps that's it. Anyone see slow scrolling on a non Nvidia card?

[hotweiss]

Hahahaha, check this out:

http://lubosz.de/Firefox3PerformanceBug/

And this bug has been reported:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/firefox/+bug/125970

[mrgnash]

Hahahaha, check this out:

http://lubosz.de/Firefox3PerformanceBug/

And this bug has been reported:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/firefox/+bug/125970

Hehehe good to know. Well, a quick and dirty fix seems to be selecting 'no style' in the view menu when viewing one of these sites that causes the slowdown.

[FuturePilot]

Hahahaha, check this out:

http://lubosz.de/Firefox3PerformanceBug/

And this bug has been reported:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/firefox/+bug/125970
Ah, good to know it's been reported.


Hehehe good to know. Well, a quick and dirty fix seems to be selecting 'no style' in the view menu when viewing one of these sites that causes the slowdown.

The other alternative is to adblock the image. You still get to enjoy the page layout. :)

[hotweiss]

Ah, good to know it's been reported.



The other alternative is to adblock the image. You still get to enjoy the page layout. :)

Yes, it's been reported over a year ago. A solution doesn't look like it's coming any time soon, lol.

[hotweiss]

According to this:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=1672814

...it seems to be a driver issue. I hope what ever fixes that bug, fixes the Flash video tearing also.

[bufsabre666]

everythings a-okay in swiftweasel, no lag or anything, do you have smooth scrolling enabled?

[hotweiss]

everythings a-okay in swiftweasel, no lag or anything, do you have smooth scrolling enabled?

Yes, smooth scrolling is enabled. Do you have a Nvidia video card?

[bufsabre666]

Yes, smooth scrolling is enabled. Do you have a Nvidia video card?

yeah, 7600gt with 173.14.05 drivers

[hotweiss]

everythings a-okay in swiftweasel, no lag or anything, do you have smooth scrolling enabled?

Wow, swiftweasel really helped out with the page I originally had trouble with, but it still had trouble with this page:

http://lubosz.de/Firefox3PerformanceBug/

It seems that the CPU tweaks help out the renderer, but they can only do so much. None the less, Swiftweasel is my new browser, lol.

[FuturePilot]

Yes, it's been reported over a year ago. A solution doesn't look like it's coming any time soon, lol.

Yeah, I just noticed that, unfortunately :(

[bufsabre666]

Wow, swiftweasel really helped out with the page I originally had trouble with, but it still had trouble with this page:

http://lubosz.de/Firefox3PerformanceBug/

It seems that the CPU tweaks help out the renderer, but they can only do so much. None the less, Swiftweasel is my new browser, lol.

swiftweasel has been my browser of choice for 6 months now, the cpu optimization is nothing to squak at, it works very nice. and version 3 was released about 12 hours ago, its very nice, enjoy the browser

[quanumphaze]

There must be something wrong with my Firefox, every page and site mentioned here loads and scrolls fast, fast, fast on my machine.....what's wrong with my Firefox?

Do you have NoScript? I find that on sites with some JavaScript special content scroll faster without the JavaScript part. eg: Slashdot comments use js and scroll faster without it.
Not sure if most other js heavy sites will even function without js though. You have to test it yourself.


Anyway I also find that blocking the background image in those listed blogs did speed it up significantly.
The http://lubosz.de/Firefox3PerformanceBug/ site did slow me down and the CPU load applet even froze while scrolling it, and I'm using Swiftweasel 3 RC1

[hanzomon4]

AHhhhhhh!!!

Why can't this just be fixed? I've had to use so many "workarounds" I can barley stand it. Do they at least know what's wrong? I thought it might be cairo but then wouldn't it affect every site? It works fine in OS X and Vista. Shouldn't it be perfect on the open source OS? Is this bug in any of the other alt OSes like Freebsd based systems?

[Moustacha]

I get this horrible lag too, nvidia card (9600GT), FF3. It doesn't lag *as much* in opera, but firefox is near unusable when it's suffering this s***

[Hells_Dark]

o/
Me too
:(

(quad core, 8800GT, 2go ram..)

[bonzodog]

The first few sites you sent me to were fine on FF3 in Arch Linux, but the performance bug one was very slow.

It seems Ubuntu is affected by this more than other distros.

[xlinuks]

For those who experience "slow scrolling" go to
Edit->Preferences->Advanced->General.
Uncheck "Use autoscrolling" and "Use smooth scrolling".
I did so and now Firefox seems to scroll a lot faster.
I don't know if this works for you as well.

[mrgnash]

For those who experience "slow scrolling" go to
Edit->Preferences->Advanced->General.
Uncheck "Use autoscrolling" and "Use smooth scrolling".
I did so and now Firefox seems to scroll a lot faster.
I don't know if this works for you as well.

Problem is, I love autoscrolling :P

[xlinuks]

Then I would suggest unchecking only the "Use smooth scrolling" option. Should help as well.

[quanumphaze]

Well I just upgraded to Swiftweasel 3.0 (pentium3m I have a Celeron M) and the scrolling is still poor, but usable.

Hopefully this bug will eventually be fixed, however I doubt it will be soon.

Smooth scrolling is disabled on my one, yet Konqueror uses smooth scrolling and has no problems.

[hotweiss]

Actually Opera 9.5 is just as fast as Firefox and it does not exhibit this laggy behavior. I've switched over to it and so far, so good.

[swoll1980]

Your computer, or internet conection perhaps? I clicked the link, and loaded the entire page in about 2 1/2 seconds. After the entire page loaded I scrolled through it with no problem.

[hotweiss]

Back to Firefox as Opera is a bit too buggy, I almost lost an hours work because it reset everything that I have written in a text box. Thank god for auto-save.