Firefox failing in Ubuntu

[Kazaryster]

I have a dual boot system currently and i love ubuntu but i always decide to
boot into windows mainly because i have an issue with Firefox. The problem with it is that
whenever im scrolling on pages that have hefty files such as flash or large images it becomes
choppy and its really annoying if anyone has a fix or an idea on how to fix this issue i
would love to hear. Oh I'm on 8.10 and I dont think its my graphics card seeing as I'm able
use compiz styling. Thanks in advance.

[bicostp]

I had the same problem on a 351 Celeron with 1 gig of RAM.

Firefox is just plain slower on Linux than it is on Windows because of the system APIs. There's not much you can do to fix it besides use Windows and only boot into Ubuntu on a virtual machine (all the good open source programs are available, and usually better, on Windows anyway), or use the Windows version of Firefox under Wine (seriously it's faster).

[hack124x768]

firefox isn't really any slower in linux, but flash sure is. Just use the stop autoplay addon and tell it to disable ALL flash applets until you click on them. Makes things a lot faster, and keeps you from getting rickrolled.

[bicostp]

firefox isn't really any slower in linux

Yes it is.

http://www.tuxradar.com/content/browser ... ux-firefox" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
(February 2009)

http://www.tuxradar.com/content/benchma ... not-pretty" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
(February 2009)

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=4833" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
(June 30 2009)

http://grigio.org/upcoming_web_browser_ ... benchmarks" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
(May? 2009)

Just use the stop autoplay addon and tell it to disable ALL flash applets until you click on them. Makes things a lot faster, and keeps you from getting rickrolled.

Oh yeah. I installed Flashblock so you have to click on Flash objects for them to load, and it helped overall performance a bit (Windows XP here).

[Sparkfist]

Tell us what your spacs are. I have a feeling that you're running Ubuntu on a lower end system. On systems where I had only 512MB or less I ran into this kind of problem. The whole fact is that if you have a slower CPU, and you have ram slim enough that the system needs to use the swap, the slow down is going to be even worse.

If you can I would suggest upgrading the ram if it's under 512MB. If you can't, I would suggest that you switch your windows manager to a lower system's resource one. Or you can go with the Xubuntu variation. That might fix the problem.

[tom61]

Tell us what your spacs are. I have a feeling that you're running Ubuntu on a lower end system. On systems where I had only 512MB or less I ran into this kind of problem. The whole fact is that if you have a slower CPU, and you have ram slim enough that the system needs to use the swap, the slow down is going to be even worse.

If you can I would suggest upgrading the ram if it's under 512MB. If you can't, I would suggest that you switch your windows manager to a lower system's resource one. Or you can go with the Xubuntu variation. That might fix the problem.

I've been noticing that Firefox under Ubuntu has been slowing down as well. Considering I have a Phenom II X3 710 and 4GB (~3.2GB accessible, since I'm running 32-bit) of RAM, I'm suspecting a recent security patch is causing issues. The Flickr upload page will grind Firefox to a halt, even though there is hardly any CPU activity and and less than 500MB of RAM in use. Larger pages of text in tabs take a while to switch between. I don't recall having this trouble earlier, and have been only applying security updates to 8.10.