Linux – Why is Firefox 3.0 so slow in Linux

firefoxlinuxperformance

I'm running Firefox 3.0.14 32-bit on Ubuntu 9.10 32-bit.

It's much slower than in Windows XP on the same machine.

Does anyone know why?

Also, what's a possible way to improve the performance?

(Please list optimizations as their own answer, so they can be rated independently.)

Best Answer

One of the cited reasons is that Linux version of Firefox is not built using PGO. PGO stands for Profile Guided Optimization. Windows version of Firefox is built on Visual C++ with PGO

IIRC Even Mozilla does not provide PGO compiled binaries for Linux. They have given a HOWTO for building Firefox with PGO, but how many of us can really do that?

If you want to get PGO compiled binaries, check Ted's PGO builds

OTOH Benchmarks show that even Windows Firefox over wine beats native Linux Firefox. If you are really unhappy, then use Chrome. Trust me, it is blazing fast.

There is a risk with PGO, since if the data provided is not proper, the performance of the final build is even worse than what it would be without PGO. Quoting from Wikipedia

The caveat, however, is that the sample of data fed to the program during the profiling stage must be statistically representative of the typical usage scenarios; otherwise, profile-guided feedback has the potential of harming the overall performance of the final build instead of improving it.

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