Firefox on Steroids
... or not?
Firefox speed is actually OK, but only in Windows. If you use Firefox on Linux, you'll find it unacceptably slow for certain things (such as handling CSS opacity, or JS-based drag'n'drop, etc.). OK, it's generally fine—but not for the type of applications I work on. :-)
To make an idea, I tested FF2 running on Windows in VMPlayer, on an average machine, and I accessed it using rdesktop from another machine in my LAN, over a wireless link. It's still waaaay faster than the one running natively in Linux.
I downloaded today the Firefox 3 Alpha-2 build, which for some reason is codenamed "Gran Paradiso". Or something.
The good news is that it's a lot faster than the version I'm currently using (2.0.0.1). I'm looking forward for the final release!
Update: hmm, just gave it another try and I think I might have been too excited the first time. The “speed” is pretty much the same as in FF 2.0, the biggest difference being that Gran Paradiso has some nasty layout bugs.
Why don't they care about Linux? :-(
Update 2: WTF am I saying? It's unbelievably fast! Let's just hope they fix all the bugs.
Comments — add your comment
I'm having the same thing
its interesting how Opera seams to render opacity alot faster than firefox on linux
I made a Webpage that used alot of PNG's with transparency and opera has trouble using all my cpu when firefox has trouble responding but firefox on windows is fine I just don't get it
Hi, Firefox2 is running very fast here. Maybe it is a problem of video drivers. I have an nVidia card. A friend of mine, using an ATI has the "slowdown" problems you mention.
Having same problem. Only on Linux (Fedora 7 and 8) with firefox 2.0. Different graphics cards make no difference, so I assume it is problem with Firefox itself (didn't have a problem with Firefox 1.5).