I've had the same sluggish performance with firefox on Fedora Core 5 through 8. Default install, no customizations. My box is a 1.6GHz machine, 1Gig RAM, and 7200 rpm drive. Whenever I surf, it renders pages slow, and I see the CPU spike 100%. This is particularly noticeable if with javascript intensive type stuff, like yahoo email.

it could be that my video card is weak. I think its an old low budget AGP card, using an open source driver.

I ran across an article on the web, that says firefox will attempt to refresh the screen every X milliseconds, and that can be adjusted with about:config. That might give me better performance.

and where is the article u speak of srtechy..hehe

well what ver. of FF are u using??

accessibility.blockautorefresh

set that to true..

thank you for your replies! i have not yet installed any add-ons since the installation is very fresh, except for "beagle indexer" that came out of the box. i just disabled it, never use it anyway. usually i have adblock, tab mix plus and the weather forecast thing installed, i do have that in windows (but tab mix plus is not available stable for firefox 3 yet?).
it is true that the sites i opened contain some flash, it were news (probably 5-8 tabs from forskning.no and a couple of tabs from aftenposten.no and zeit.net). but still, in firefox 1.5 in suse 10.1 i could open 30-something tabs and performance would be affected, but not stalled.
my notebook's performance is rather limited, too, 1,5ghz celeron and 756mb ram. but firefox is not 3d-rendering, right?

best regards
ungua

I'm now thinking my firefox performance problem is because of the old AGP video card. I have a Dell 810 laptop, with around 2GHz processor, running the same FC8, and firefox page rendering is snappy, without spiking the CPU. Although this doesn't explain how Opera can render pages faster.

i only have an onboard graphics chip ... about the other problem, when it is not possible to open an rss-feed from the bookmark toolbar:
screenshot ("åpne i ny fane" is norwegian for "open in new tab" then).

best regards
ungua

just one more thing: i now use opensuse 11 and firefox 3.0.3. but the computer cpu is still showing a "pulse", as if something is using it. and that's also when i walk away and the machine idles. screenshot of that reflected by temperatures: click. where does that come from? is it firefox who does this?
in ksysguard's "process table" i cannot find "cpu usage" anymore which specifies single applications use of the cpu. can i turn it on somehow? that's because firefox is stopping up and the cpu is working hard after a couple of minutes surfing on the internet. in windows, firefox is slowed down and wouldn't take commands for some moments while it starts. it's probably the same phenomenon?

best regards
ungua

I wonder how is Opera going to help with privacy issues, and how could someone guarantee it hasn't got a trojan or spyware inside being it a closed source product

But yes. In linux, choosing a browser is a matter of choosing the best amongst a bunch of bad ones.

Firefox can work well sometimes and very bad some others, depending on the options you used to compile it, and some other components of the system. Though certainly lots of problems has problems with it. It's not a particularly good pieces of software, and I am not a big fan of the gecko engine either. Though it seems to render acceptably the greater number of sites. Having a good plugins infrastructure certainly has helped it to become mainstream.

All in all, both firefox and gecko are ram hungry beasts, which makes the thing worse.

I'd like to see a finished webkit based browser on linux, but there's none yet that can compare to firefox or opera in functionality. Konqueror is the closest one but it's khtml and has a number of problems. I used to use it a lot in the past.

ungua, ksysguard itself might not be so soft in cpu. Use htop from command line and press shift+P to sort the rows by the cpu power they are consuming.

Sorry for the delayed answer. I find your browser-statements quite interesting!

According to Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former prime minister of Norway, "it' s typical Norwegian to be good". With that problem solved, do you really expect Opera to be exploiting its users in some commercial or other ways?

As compared to Windows? Mac? Why is that so, I thought that Linux as a community driven, web focused operating system should excel at this. But that thought died when I started using Linux as my main operating system in 2004. What is inefficient with Firefox, do you have a compact statement to read somewhere? Concerning applications, I only added Adblock Plus in my Linux-installation of Firefox*.

I have Ksysguard running constantly in order to control the temperature of my notebook. There have been a couple of incidents that made me wish to do so; quite new post about that can be found here. But might it actually be an interaction between Firefox and Ksysguard that creates the "pulsating"-patterns observed in the temperature and system use logs in Ksysguard? This is not a problem, just something I observe everytime I come back to my notebook. Or is it as simple as the fan changing rpm rhythmically?

Best regards
Ungua

*Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; nb-NO; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008091700 SUSE/3.0.3-1.1 Firefox/3.0.3

Hello,

I have Firefox (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008111217 Fedora/3.0.4-1.fc9 Firefox/3.0.4) consuming almost all cpu resources after a couple of hours of limited usage on my Fedora 9.

Even with all tabs except one shutdown there is a cycling of cpu usage that almost renders the PC unusable. I ignored it previously since I thought it was because I was downloading Fedora updates etc - but since then I have found that even with nothing else going on, I get this cpu surge.

Haven't had this experience with XP - on either Chrome or Firefox (old version 2). And just when I thought I had made a relatively painless transition from XP to Linux!!

Appreciate any thoughts.

I am with smurthy, again: Since nobody replied here yet, I started a new topic.

Regards
Ungua