[ale] Firefox Running Slow in Linux

[Jim Philips]

On Mon, 2009-02-02 at 15:52 -0500, Marc Ferguson wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 3:38 PM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>         Everything M. Warfield said and what specifically is the
>         scrolling
>         issue you see? Hangs on scroll, jumpy scroll, won't scroll,
>         etc?
>         
>         I have a dual Op with 4GB RAM and 64-bit firefox. As my memory
>         gets
>         chewed up, firefox performance degrades. 3.0.5 seems better
>         than prior
>         3.0.x version but it still will crash and vanish thanks to
>         crappy
>         javascript all over the place. I also run the adobe testing
>         version of
>         flash for 64-bit Linux. It _mostly_ works but I have seen it
>         tear down
>         firefox to a bit heap of weeping page faults.
>         
>         2009/2/2 Marc Ferguson <marcferguson at gmail.com>:
>         
>         > Hi,
>         >
>         > I know I'll probably get hazed by this already saturated
>         question, but I
>         > haven't found any solid answers to my issue from the
>         archives.  I'm running
>         > Fedora 10 x86_64 and loving the "adventure" of running an 64
>         bit system.
>         > I'm also running Firefox 3.0.x (x86_64), but I've noticed
>         that it's not very
>         > smooth compared to it running on a Windows machine and I'm
>         little confused
>         > why.
>         >
>         > It's more the scroll bar than anything else.  It's something
>         small, but it's
>         > ruining the surfing experience and I'm a little embarrassed
>         to let other
>         > people use it on my desktop.  I don't want to give Linux a
>         bad name and
>         > these folks are primarily Windows/MAC users.  So; their
>         experience with
>         > using Firefox on my system is a tainted one.
>         >
>         > I've tried running Swiftfox, but I haven't gotten it to load
>         (that's another
>         > issue) so I'm kind of stuck with Firefox.
>         >
>         > --
>         > Marc F.
>         >
>         > www.fergytech.com
>         > Registered Linux User: #410978
>         >
>         > "When life gives me lemons... I make Linuxaide, hmm good
>         stuff!" -Marc F.
>         >
>         
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>         >
>         >
>         
>         
>         
>         --
>         --
>         James P. Kinney III
>         _______________________________________________
>         Ale mailing list
>         Ale at ale.org
>         http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> 
> Wow, again, the community comes with the MANsers!  I'll post my specs
> when I get in, but I'm shocked to see that Mozilla doesn't have much
> love for our market.  I assumed that since it was FOSS that it would
> give more love to Linux, but I guess Windows has more pull than I
> thought.  That's what I get for ASSuming things.  Reid, I look forward
> to "nightly" adventures... so I'll look into the latest beta build
> too.
> 
> Oh and to confirm, it probably is my nVidia car.  Ever since I've been
> running this system and learning about Linux (9+ months), there has
> ALWAYS been a common denominator... and that's my graphics card
> (nVidia GeForce 8600 GT).  If I didn't need 3D support A LOT of my
> issues would have gone away.  Amazing how troublesome this awesome
> little graphics card has become to FOSS users.

You didn't say whether it was KDE or Gnome. That could be relevant with
your newer nVidia card. In trying to run KDE 4 with the 180 series
nVidia driver, I ended up switching to Gnome. KDE 4 was just unbearably
slow and the fan ran constantly. The KDE developers have said there is
an issue that has to be fixed in the driver. But even after switching, I
ran into another bug that prevents me from running Songbird at all.
Again, it turns out to be the nVidia 180 driver. Some people have been
able to resolve this by downgrading the nVidia driver to an older
version. But clearly, some people wouldn't like that solution.