I have noticed that Firefox on linux renders things much slower than on the same machine in Windows Xp sp2. PIII 600 MHZ 640 MB RAM, Voodoo 3 card.

Anyone else have this problem?

What distro?

i have the same problem..
opera and firefox loads slower than their windows versions.
what is he reason..
i have p4 2.4 512mb ram geforce mx440

Its a matter of distros guys. Most distros are compiled for i386 pcs and therefore dont get all the power out of any processor. My Firefox runs faster, feels more stable and works better in my Linux box (Gentoo) then in any Windoze PC Ive seen it.

To get Firefox to load quicker you can use prelink.
"prelink is a program which modifies ELF shared libraries and ELF dynamically linked binaries, so that the time which dynamic linker needs for their relocation at startup significantly decreases and also due to fewer relocations the run-time memory consumption decreases too (especially number of unshareable pages). Such prelinking information is only used if all its dependant libraries have not changed since prelinking, otherwise programs are relocated normally."
http://www.maconlinux.net/linux-man-...prelink.8.html

After prelinking Firefox loads faster than Konqueror or Opera.

On my Debian system Firefox loads faster than it did on WinME.

There are ways you can tweak the speed up Firefox itself.
"Speed up Firefox"
http://www.extensionsmirror.nl/index.php?showtopic=2875

It's very important to have a kernel compiled for your processor type. Running an i386 kernel on a AMD or Pentium is a waste. These kernels are installed by default by most distributions.

Having software compiled for the processor type is less important.

I'm not talking about load time, I'm talking about page renedering speed. I'm using SUse 9.3 but Firefox is compiled i586.

Just out of interest. Are windows xp binaries compiled for processor arch of the system or are they all i386.

I think it depends entirely on how your system and kernel are compiled. And how Firefox is compiled as well. The number of extensions and the theme you use can change the way Firefox works as well.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050517 Firefox/1.0.4 (Debian package 1.0.4-2)

kernel 2.6.11 i686 GNU/Linux

Anthlon 1.8Mhz,1GB DDRram 400mhz, cable broadband 3MB
With the above, pages load faster on Linux than they do using WinME, same machine dualboot separate harddrives.

I have tested pages loading with IE6,Opera8, Galeon, Mozilla, Konqueror, Epiphany and Firefox; and Firefox beats them all. I do have it tweaked quite a bit and only use 16 extensions.

ttt

This will improve when Firefox3 goes stable.

The problem started about 2.0.0... something I think.

In the mean time I've noticed that gnome's epiphany-browser is a bit quicker, even though it still uses the problematic gecko backend. Faster than swiftfox but with less functionality it seems.

As for optimised compilation, that's great but it may well be addressing the symptoms rather than the cause. Still a good idea for now and the future though. It's made me realise I need to optimise this 386 compiled setup here.

edit:: Changing to 686 kernel from 386 isn't supposed to help nowadays - the kernel now detects this stuff automagically

Using Swiftfox might at least give you the the impression the pages are loading faster. Or you can try Swiftweasel.

I actually have a machine where firefox seems to be slower on linux than windows as well. I think it is primarily because my graphics card isn't well supported in linux and the CPU is old (PII) so too much work gets put on my old CPU.

I'm Running firefox in fedora 8 (x86_64) with a quad core and 4G RAM. On top on that I'm running XP x86_64 in vmware. Firefox loads and renders MUCH quicker on the virtual machine that on the host.

So much so, I use a virtual XP machine for web browsing. Isn't that a little odd?

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There are 2 kinds of people: Those that understand octal and those that don't

..and this is before we get to the slowness of Flash.

This is madness. It shouldn't be like this.

I wonder if perhaps I'm doing something differently to the people who do the coding.

the reason is the full java system and add on plugins they take a litlle time to to start the program and get it going when you run a browser it uses many programs and linux runs them as needed then they run stable and smooth. the thing is stable and smooth I use firefox seamonkey and opera opera blows them all away. but firefox downlod is faster. opera 9.25 with flash9 makes youtube real nice. pluss the speed dial on the open page. cofigure your kernel for i686 and compile and install have fun and fast.

For some people I noticed that pages render more slowly because their firewall is blocking general use ports that a site may try to use. This is most apparent, for instance, when trying to watch a video on YouTube. So, if you find pages are loading slowly, tail your firewall logs at the same time. That way you can see if there is any relation.

In general, however, I find that Firefox actually opens quicker and is a little peppier than its Windows counterpart. This comparison is done using a shared profile between Windows and Linux, so there isn't a difference in addons. The plugins are different, though.

I agree that flash seems to work a little better on Windows than Linux.