Why is firefox so slow?
 

Ive been using kde for a while now, Im not the best with linux but learning quickly. Just curious. Firefox seems to be really slow. and konquier <- How ever you spell it. Is there anything else anyone uses out there? for speed? they both seem to lag for me.

p4 2.0ghz mobile
512 ram

Its not my computer or internet.


Thanks
- Jon

Hi,
You could try this : it's a well-known little trick :
type in the navigation bar (no space between about and : )
of Firefox, then scroll till you see : network.dns.disableIPv6 , it is set on false, just toggle it to true.
Might get a better response time.

hope it helps

Opera is pretty fast. I don't find it any faster then firefox but if you are having problems with firefox then you could try it.

Dillo is the fastest little web browser that I have used but it does not render frames correctly or Java or flash. It will allow you to see text content, images and hyperlinks.

Sometimes Mozilla runs better than Firefox. Also depends on what version of Firefox you are running. 1.0.6 seems to be good.

There is also Galeon, Cheetah, Konqueror. Konqueror is solid but a little slow rendering.
There are also CLI browsers. Lynx and links.

You can also try this for Firefox.............

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.

User.js - Speed Up Firefox The Extensions Mirror

I have Firefox, Mozilla, Galeon, Konqueror, Opera 8.02, Netscape7.2, Lynx, links2, Dillo installed.

I find Firefox to be by far the fastest, with Opera coming in a close second.

Check out the link above. Try disabling Ip6. You might also want to install Tweak Network Settings extension .

The only drawback to Firefox is it uses alot of ram and xfree86 ram usage tends to increase if I am online for a long period of time using Firefox. No biggie really.

100% better!!! thank you guys so much!

I have VectorLinux5.0SOHO installed and this is actually the first time firefox acted so slow. disabling ipv6 really helped a lot, but still some javascripts (scrolling down) wont scroll unless i move the page down, then stop again. i also noticed that its making the whole computer slower, my memory is more than enough to handle a lot of memory intensive programs but firefox still slows them, is there any other way we could load firefox into ram completely? im still a newbie and still googling around for answers, a lot of articles on the web but nothing that concerns loading it into memory.

I tried Vector and I thought that it was a slow acting distro. Which was surprising since it is based on Slack. KDE is it's default so that's part of it. It is a easy to set up distro though.

If you have at least 256 MB RAM in the machine it won't swap until you've run the machine for hours. Unless you are running some heavy graphics apps.
The more RAM you put in the box the better.
If you only have 128 MB or less in the machine then it will swap. The solution is to run a lighter windows mgr like fluxbox, that will take up way less RAM. Or put more RAM in the machine. KDE slows things down regardless of what you do. Running KDE and Slack is like running a swift horse and then putting a heavy load on it.

I just wanted to weigh in and say that Opera is by far the "lightest" browser I have ever used. If I actually watch my RAM when laucnhing different browsers, Opera is the best on my system.