Slower Firefox page loading on Ubuntu v. Windows

[Robbo]

On Fri, 2005-09-23 at 14:18 -0400, Steve Zatz wrote:
> I have two Windows XP machines and one Ubuntu (Hoary) machine on my
> home network and in side by side comparisons, the loading of pages in
> Firefox is 2-5x slower on Ubuntu v. the Windows' machines.  I have
> swapped the various network connections so it does not appear to be a
> problem with the physical network.  The hardware is roughly
> comparable.  I can commonly watch the Firefox status bar on Ubuntu
> report that it is "Looking up ..." while this status is usually gone
> in an instant on the Windows machines.  Firefox appears to be
> configured identically across all three machines.  I started noticing
> the problem about a month ago -- before that if there was a speed
> difference it wasn't so noticeable that I was moved to do some timings
> and investigate.  If anyone has any thoughts for investigating this
> further or potential remedies, I would be very interested.  Thanks.

Also try these...

Here's something for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up:
1.Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down
and look for the following entries: network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When
you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds
up page loading. 2. Alter the entries as follows: Set
"network.http.pipelining" to "true" Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining"
to "true" Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like
30. This means it will make 30 requests at once. 3. Lastly right-click
anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay"
and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser
waits before it acts on information it receives. If you're using a
broadband connection you'll load pages MUCH faster now!

Copied from http://forevergeek.com/open_source/make_firefox_faster.php