Hi! Here I sit in Nanjing, China. I wanted to buy a flight to Germany. I start Fedora 20. Start Firefox, and look up Lufthansa. The web page is very slow loading after I enter the airport and date details.
My girlfriend said, "Use my computer, it's faster than Linux."
I said, we are using the same internet connection, how can your internet be faster than my internet?"
I sit and wait. She calls me, "Come and look baby, I have the flight details." Linux is still loading. We check out the best times and days, buy the flight on her (Windows) computer. I come back to my laptop. Still no flight details loaded.

Any ideas why Win is so much quicker? I have often complained about slow internet, but then, I never use Win. Chinese Win seems very invasive, pop-ups everywhere. But you don't have to wait 2 hours for a webpage to load.

Is there a (Linux) reason for this difference???

maybe that particular site has some active-x or asp specific enhancements that only windows can exploit. i would try bench-marking a few other popular sites. i would also try another distro live-usb to see if it is different.

also maybe the great firewall of china is doing something to your browser (maybe set your browsers user-agent to match windows and see if that changes anything.

peculiar...

Hi Pedroski,

I think there are a lot of variables here to consider. The computer's capabilities as well as workload, their network connections, as well as the browser settings and add-ons.

Computers: Are they identical, or is one more capable than the other one? More capable would be faster CPU, more RAM. Are both systems doing similar things; for instance were they both doing nothing other than running the web browser to book your air travel? Or was one doing other things too, like editing a document, compiling code, playing a movie? That's just stuff to consider; how "loaded" up is a given system?

Network connection: Are one or you wireless or plugged directly in via an Ethernet cable? For instance the wired in Ethernet cable is likely always going to be faster than WIFI. You should also understand the specifics about the network connections for each computer. One may be wired Ethernet at 100 MBps and the other one may be as bad as 802.11 "legacy" which can be as low as 1 MBps.

The browser: Windows is Internet Explorer; however one can install other browsers there. Similarly you can install other browsers in Linux. You can also install ad blockers, pop-up blockers, script controllers, and so forth. Say the browser on Linux has a lot of that stuff configured or installed and as a result it inhibits that page from loading because that particular page does a lot of data mining or runs scripts. In that, the question then becomes; "Did it ever finish loading?" Because maybe it only went so far because you block scripts and it will never fully load until you allow scripts for that page, at least temporarily. All or none of this may apply, I think it really matters how you've configured your browser and what protective add-ons you may have installed.

In summary, I do not believe there is a Linux reason here. Linux and Windows are both operating systems; they have their merits as well as drawbacks. I think the difference her lies in one or all of the properties I'm mentioning above.

The girlfriend uses Win 7 and google chrome, I use Firefox and Ubuntu or Fedora. She was using wireless, I was using cable. Neither of us were doing anything else.

How do I set Firefox to look like IE or Win??

I did a quick search and there are old answers saying that vbscript and active-x are proprietary Microsoft things. Firstly I can't believe that there haven't been some parallel capabilities incorporated into other browsers to satisfy those technologies. The answers were like 2009, 2005; like I say old answers. In the meantime, I find it unbelievable that a website would rely and require solely Microsoft only capabilities in this day and age; if it were the case that still no other browsers can support active-x or vbscripts.

As far as making firefox be the same as IE? I don't know, sarcastically ... remove all protections and capabilities which are there normally to protect you from intrusion and malware and then that will make it like IE. Maybe a better way is to do what was suggested by schneidz where you profile a couple of websites, and further install the same browser on both computers and try that. Even so, I'm betting that a Linux based Firefox install and a Windows based Firefox install may be subtly different insofar as settings.

And then all I can say is if I have trouble loading a website via Firefox, I allow all scripts to run temporarily for a given page and that typically makes it work for me. The question then becomes whether or not I approve of how much that website is trying to run. I'm betting that an airline wants to shove a ton of advertisements in your face. Meanwhile my bank also does require scripts, but fewer of them and I tend to trust their website needs "intentions" a bit more than a trust some place you go to buy stuff.

last year orbitz would charge mac users higher airline tickets:
http://abcnews.go.com/Travel/mac-use...ry?id=16650014

so it wouldnt be out-of-the-ordinary for a website that sells stuff to look at your cookies/user-agent and populate results accordingly. maybe the programming in their site doesnt contain a default setting (for the rare linux user) so that it loops continually between:my suspician is that they are using some sort of ad blocker in firefox therefor the site is mad that it cant render ads and eventually times out ?

Or it could be as simple as a faulty Ethernet cable, NIC, or router port that your machine is using.

Have you tried running bandwidth tests on both machines? You should narrow the problem down - are ALL websites slower on your Linux box or just THIS website?

If it's not a hardware fault, my guess is it's a plugin on that site that's pissed off at your web browser. It happens all the time, on Linux, Mac, and Windows (though more-so on Linux since developers typically don't test their sites' behavior as well or at all on Linux).

Well, the funny thing is, I loaded the exact same lufthansa.com page the day before, to check out the flights and prices. It loaded ok. Yesterday, I could not load bbc.co.uk to read the news. I started my vpn, but still couldn't load it. I contacted Astrill, but they couldn't solve the problem. Today, the bbc loads fine. Now I can't load lufthansa.com! Weird!Also, on the computer at work yesterday, I could read the bbc news and check out the flights on various airline sites.

If my laptop has a hardware problem, why would that be only for certain sites. linuxquestions.org and all the other 20 tabs I always have open load fine! Even gmail loads. The govt here block gmail in a running battle with google. If I ping 8.8.8.8, which is google I believe, the first 2 pings are ok, the rest get "lost"

I will start Ubuntu, see if the problem persists.

Well, I find, if I use Ubuntu, I cannot load the BBC at home. I can on my computer at work using the same Ubuntu. If I start Fedora 20, I can load the BBC, but not lufthansa.com

I have no explanation for this. I will start Windows and see what that does.

maybe dns issues... maybe you can try with ip-address.

I once encountered a similar problem where some distros and some websites would work fine, while others would never load. My problem ended up being caused by a broken TCP window scaling implementation in the router. I ended up turning off TCP window scaling on the computer and everything cleared up.

You could try running
to see if that clears up the problem. If so, you can make the change permanent in sysctl.conf.

Thanks for that. Tried it, but it didn't work. I cannot access lufthansa.com from Fed 20, but it works in Ubuntu. The BBC is accessible from Fed 20

In Fed 20 I get this (almost blank)page:

http://202.102.110.207/error/

It says (Chinese) 网站维护中 = website defence hit

Any ideas what that is about

At work, right now, I get redirected to

http://404.union77.com/?city=nj some kind of Chinese search engine, when I enter lufthansa.com

20 open tabs on an older computer will make things slow. My wife also complains internet is slow on an old atom, but she always has 3 firefox browsers open each with a minimum of 15 tabs.

Try reducing tabs and for those funny sites, it is definitely the chinese firewall or dns settings, the last 2 posts would be the former and the last post the later.

Well, I am in my office right now. I closed all other tabs in Firefox. Using Fedora 20 on my Toshiba C600D laptop via our office network, I cannot open lufthansa.com. I removed all cookies, and tried. However, my office computer using Ubuntu loads lufthansa.com immediately. Both computers are connected to the same router. Also, I can load lufthansa.com at home using Ubuntu.

Can anyone explain that? If my hardware is faulty, both systems should throw up the same problem. If this is a dns problem, why does the office computer load the page?