Saturday, August 08, 2009

Ubuntu Firefox sucks?

Firefox on Ubuntu seems to have slower performance than on other OSes.


Symptoms:
- slow on page with flash, or hang when scroll fast, or unbearable slow (invoking CD-ROM) when type in address bar, especially on "backspace" key, ...


AFAIK, there are 3 major causes:
- FF's database SQLite becomes big and defragmented
- weak graphic card (usually on laptop)
- IPv6 is higher priority than IPv4 in FF by default.


Recommended work-arounds:
- change Visual Effects to "None"
- disable IPv6 in "about:config"
- clean up SQLite unused entries: first, install sqlite3 client
sudo apt-get install sqlite3
then enter these commands
find ~/.mozilla -type f -name "*.sqlite" -exec sqlite3 ‘{}’ VACUUM \;
find ~/.mozilla -type f -name "*.sqlite" -exec sqlite3 ‘{}’ REINDEX \;
or use these commands instead
for i in ~/.mozilla/firefox*/*/*.sqlite; do sqlite3 $i vacuum; done;


Alternative browsers:

+ Google Chrome for Linux
( http://www.google.com/chrome?platform=linux )

+ Konqueror
( sudo apt-get install konqueror )

+ Chromium (Ubuntu)
http://ubuntugeek.com/install-chromium-google-chrome-web-browser-in-ubuntu.html

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