AFAIK, being cross-platform really slows things down. That's why, for example, Konqueror is so much faster than Firefox.

I know there are lots of Windows users who adore Firefox, but my question is: Do you think Firefox would be faster and easier to improve if the developers would concentrate on Linux only?

(If you think this thread is foolish, just ignore it )

Firefox concetrating in Linux only? I highly doubt it. I kinda got the feeling that Firefox main target is Windows and IE explorer users. You can see how much the UI of Firefox is much closer to IE ratter then its roots with Netscape and Mozilla. The fact that a few things Firefox does also works better in Windows (as integration with Thunderbird, for example) makes me really believe in what I'm saying.

Now, I'm not saying that Firefox is doing a wrong thing here, on the contrary. Also, Firefox speed most likely has nothing to do with it being cross-platform or not. Opera, from my experience is faster then Firefox on every platform it runs.

I'm not sure what you mean about Konqueror speed either: Does it render pages faster? If that's the case, there are some plugins for Firefox to speed things up. On the other hand, if you meant that Konqueror opens faster (and you are running KDE), then it's not all strange, since it then would work as Internet Explorer and Windows does, in other words: integrated/preloaded with the Desktop Evr.

But if you really meant the speed of rendering pages, I doubt peoples with fast Internet connection will ever notice it.

I surely use FasterFox to speed things up, but the Firefox launch is what bothers me. I have a few extensions installed, but on my notebook (very slow hard disk, 256M RAM), Firefox takes ages to load.

Is there any way to preload Firefox on KDE?

Is Firefox running faster on Gnome? I think it does. Why?

Firefox/Mozilla are slow slugs, it doesnt matter if its cross platform, it wasent designed for speed. If you look at a lot of it, most of the UI (or probably all of it) is implemented using javascript or something simular (of all the slow languages to use ....), so it has to load up and run a hudge amount of scripts before you can use it.

I know this is very much a personal experience thing, but Firefox on my Windows XP on my old computer only takes 2 seconds longer to load than IE.

SciYro:
Why is it made like that then?!
Isn't this slow GUI a direct consequence of the different GUIs on Linux/Mac/Windows?

Firefox uses GTK2, unlike Mozilla, which (I think) uses it's own toolkit (?). Perhaps that's why it runs faster (again, ?) on GNOME.

I'm a little confused here, is this thread about Firefox running or loading faster if it weren't cross platform?

In the end, it basically depends on your network connection. I don't really believe that the browser makes any difference.

Me, I use Epiphany, for the same reasons that Windows people use IE.

//Blessings are not just for the ones who kneel, luckily//

Also, for "browser evangelism" purposes, I would strongly disagree with any proposition to make Firefox a "Linux-only" project. I like having it installed on my Windows partition so I can have an alternative to IE. Plus most Windows users really need a taste of the open source world.

I completely agree. I've been trying for ages to convert my friends to FireFox and I'm slowly starting to win the battle I think. I still use it on my Linux box just for the familiarity factor and it seems to work alright, but I haven't really compared it to the alternatives.

Personally I don't think Firefox would be any faster if it was a linux only app. At the moment it seems to be slower than Konqueror or opera because of the memory leaks and probably the gecko engine itself. If those things were sorted then I am sure Firefox would be a bit snappier on most of the platforms that it runs on. Also as mentioned above its better for some opensource projects to run on multi platforms to give others a chance to try out alternative applications. Maybe some of those people can contribute something to the opensource community.

I'm using Firefox on Windows too (what did you think? that I'd use IE?!?!), but I was just wondering why it is slower than Konqueror or Opera.

And here's what I understood from the answers:
* Konqueror gets preloaded in KDE. That's why it's faster (sorta IE on Windows)
* Opera uses a better engine (?) and has a somewhat faster GUI (?)


It's startup is slower than Konqueror and Opera on my machine. Page rendering speed is good. GUI is SLOW! (e.g. closing/opening tabs, using the sidebar, opening dialog boxes etc.)

(Actually when I posted this question I thought of some kind of abstract "code base" (what is XUL?) which makes it run on 3 platforms.)

Opera is slower for me. It's probably just based on personal experience though.

i never really look into and "chasing" after mozilla/firefox stuffs but appearantly their source codes are rather large and rather "spread out" like hell , lots of "scriptings" text(??) files or something , probably good for cross-platform development but opera is also a cross-platform browser too , source codes ?? i donno but i guess they are much smaller , why ?? probably they are pretty much coders under one roof ... while i think mozilla/firefox coders are rather spread out all over the shops , so probably their coding style is kind of inevitable and it works quite well considering it size and they might also show us a very different way of software managment and it organisation in a nutshell ... i think they are good at what they are doing actually ...


//but i could be wrong with all these ...


.

Something people all too often forget is that the reason IE is faster is that most of it's parts are integrated into the kernel and loaded at startup. This is really an unfair comparison.

For me, Linux is all about choice and optimisation, so if you are not happy with a particular application, you can either speed it up or try an alternative.

I am running Gentoo linux and am more than happy with the speed of Firefox. It loads in under 1 second, and with the fasterfox extension is just as fast, if not faster than other browsers I have tried. I have no complaints whatsoever about Firefox performance and will be sticking with it for the forseeable future...

As far as I am aware, the code to run apps on Windows, Mac, Linux etc is completely different anyway, and there are already seperate teams of developers working on different platforms. After all, can you install firefox.exe on linux (without wine), or install the linux binaries on a windows box? No. There is no one cross platform application for firefox, but rather completely seperate applications for each platform with a common end result as far as look and feel is concerned.

So, personally I feel that the answer to the poll is: No, it wouldn't make the blindest bit of difference, as the windows app is completely separate anyway.