Digg.com slow in Firefox on Ubuntu, but not in Windows, nor even Wine

[altonbr]

I've found when visiting Digg.com - a very AJAX/JavaScript intensive site - that my browser can get bogged down quite easily by their massive amount of JavaScript.

The thing is, when using Firefox 3 on Windows or even through WINE (!) it performs much much faster. This includes hit 'Ctrl++' to increase the font size (or zoom, as they now call it).

Yes, these tests have been run on the same machine and no, nothing is through a virtual environment.

Why do you think this is? Is there anyway to improve the performance?

I know TraceMonkey (a JavaScript intrepeter) will be coming out for Firefox 3.1 and it advertising amazing speedups[1], but even if it were to be released today, we wouldn't be able to use it until 9.04.

[1] http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/08/tracemonkey_javascript_lightsp.html

So does anyone know why AJAX/JavaScript and the 'zoom' feature would be slowing in Linux than on Windows (or even through Wine)?

My PC isn't amazing, but it isn't bad either:

Pentium 4 640
GeForce 6800
2GB 4-4-4-12 DDR2 RAM
TB of disk space, etc.

[b3n87]

I found the Apple website like that, could be something to do with Flash 10?

[altonbr]

I found the Apple website like that, could be something to do with Flash 10?

It's been happening for longer than Flash 10 and Flash is blocked on my PC.

[Vadi]

If you're on nvidia, it could be the drivers. Make sure they're the latest stable (177). If you're on that, maybe give 180.06 a try - they're a beta and a pita to install, but did speed up javascript performance for pages that were freezing/being slow.

[Sealbhach]

I know TraceMonkey (a JavaScript intrepeter) will be coming out for Firefox 3.1 and it advertising amazing speedups[1], but even if it were to be released today, we wouldn't be able to use it until 9.04.



You can get Firefox 3.1 now, although it's Alpha. I'm using it right now. You can get it here:

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/

Extract the tar.bz2 in your /home folder and a new folder called "firefox" will be created. Then to run it just:

/home/username/firefox/firefox

It's so much faster than 3.0.....:)


.

[altonbr]

If you're on nvidia, it could be the drivers. Make sure they're the latest stable (177). If you're on that, maybe give 180.06 a try - they're a beta and a pita to install, but did speed up javascript performance for pages that were freezing/being slow.


You can get Firefox 3.1 now, although it's Alpha. I'm using it right now. You can get it here:

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/

Extract the tar.bz2 in your /home folder and a new folder called "firefox" will be created. Then to run it just:

/home/username/firefox/firefox

It's so much faster than 3.0.....:)


.

Those are both great suggestions, but do you know why Firefox 3 is so much slower in Linux than on Windows using the same machine? It feels REALLY sluggish.

I'll play with my add-ons and user profiles.

Thanks for the link to 3.1, I'm looking forward to trying it!

[sharon.gmc]

I have the same problem. . . I always go to Digg.com. . .

[altonbr]

PS: running 'firefox' in that .tar.bz opens up my Firefox 3.0.4 and running 'firefox-bin' returns:

firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libxul.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

EDIT: Sorry, it was because 3.0.4 was currently open and apparently it can't run the two synchronously.

It's still no where near the performance of 3.0 on Windows unfortuantely. It is very very sugglish... I'm wondering if I should wipe my settings/OS here soon.

[altonbr]

I have the same problem. . . I always go to Digg.com. . .

Have you tried any other browsers or versions of Firefox?