[ubuntu-uk] Firefox, Swiftfox and Swiftweasel

[Rowan Berkeley]

I have Firefox on two machines side-by-side right now, one running
Ubuntu 8.10 and the other running Windows XP, and Firefox runs extremely
fast on the Ubuntu machine and extremely slow on the Windows one. I
admit the machine running Ubuntu has a faster CPU, but the freezing and
lagging you describe are and have always been Windows-related problems
for me, and I have had none of them on the Ubuntu machine at all.
Perhaps you are using an older version of Ubuntu, like 8.04?

On Tue, 2009-03-31 at 21:02 +0100, ubuntu-uk-request at lists.ubuntu.com
wrote:
> Message: 8
> Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2009 19:52:23 +0100
> From: Jai Harrison <jai at jaiharrison.com>
> Subject: [ubuntu-uk] Firefox, Swiftfox and Swiftweasel
> To: British Ubuntu Talk <ubuntu-uk at lists.ubuntu.com>
> Message-ID:
>         <37eeeb790903311152o36ef84c0l640b95400b400a3b at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
> Hey everyone,
> 
> I've been experiencing some issues with Firefox lately (freezing
> during general use, lagging during Flash video playback, etc.). So I
> looked into it and it appears that the binary provided in Ubuntu for
> Firefox doesn't use some special compiler/compile method that is used
> on the Windows binaries. Next I found Swiftfox but because it is
> proprietary software I continued to search the web until I came across
> Swiftweasel (which is AFAIK the same thing but without the Firefox
> branding).
> 
> Unfortunately the latest *.deb provided is for version 3.0.3 (there
> have been numerous security patches since then) and the tar.gz along
> with instructions for 3.0.8 does not appear to work on Ubuntu (I've
> tried it).
> 
> So I've been using Swiftweasel 3.0.3 lately and didn't notice much
> difference which led me to believe that my Firefox profile might have
> been damaged by an extension or simply have gotten crowded over the
> years. Thus I created a new profile but when trying to install Google
> Gears in Swiftweasel it wouldn't acknowledge installation on any Gears
> enabled websites. So I copied my profile over to Firefox and got Gears
> to work in that now leaving me running a newish profile under Firefox
> with a few questions.
> 
> 1) How much better will the performance be from Swiftweasel? Is it
> worth migrating this profile back to the browser with the
> understanding that Gears will probably work now it's been installed?
> As such should I spend further time trying to get the Firefox 3.0.8
> tar.gz to work in Ubuntu or just settle for 3.0.3 knowing there is
> exposed security flaws in it?
> 
> 2) How come Firefox is so slow on GNU/Linux anyway? I've been looking
> at threads on the Ubuntu forums where people go as far as to say that
> Firefox is as much as twice as fast on Windows XP. Surely someone
> inside Canonical will compile Firefox using the same compiling
> technique as used with Windows if that is what's causing the problem.
> Otherwise how come that a FOSS browser is slower on the most open
> platform OS when the majority of its users on said platform are
> developers?
> 
> I have an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU (2MB Cache)     T5750  @ 2.00GHz  along
> with 2GB of RAM (over half of which isn't being used). This doesn't
> seem to be a question of insufficient hardware to me.
> 
> I await your replies,
> 
> Jai "Venko"
>