

Browser benchmarks: even Wine beats Linux Firefox - kqr2
http://www.tuxradar.com/content/browser-benchmarks-2-even-wine-beats-linux-firefox

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snitko
I've been using Firefox 2 and 3 on Linux (OpenSuse and Ubuntu) for over a year
now on different machines with different video adapters, and I can confirm it
is definitely the slowest browser I've ever used. I disabled all the
unnecessary addons, but still it takes a long time to start FF, it eats memory
and works slow with js.

I can't switch, because it would be more inconvenient to use Opera than
getting used to slowness of FF. So I hope this is going to be fixed in future.

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evdawg
Just a heads up: Wine is not an emulator, so software running under Wine is
infact "native" software. There is no reason why it should be slow, so saying
"Wine beats Linux Firefox" should not necessarily imply that Linux Firefox is
particularly sluggish.

~~~
moe
But it shows that windows firefox is still much faster than linux firefox.

I'm very grateful for this article because this has been a pet peeve of mine
for years, too. I sometimes run a win32 firefox inside a vmware window side-
by-side to the native linux fox - even the vmware fox wins hands down, talk
about humiliation.

The situation has improved a lot with Firefox 3 and the latest Minefields but
it's still a night and day difference to windows or OSX. While the UI
performance has become nearly bearable (at least it doesn't freeze rock solid
for multiple seconds anymore) the javascript performance is still ridiculous.
Usability tanks with only a few addons loaded and Firebug has become nearly
useless to me recently because it has grown a habit to halt on any pages
containing non-trivial javascript with the dreaded "A script on this page made
me pee, Abort or Freeze?"-dialog.

Opera is proof that it doesn't have to be that way. It's zippy on every
platform, including linux. Just compare the two on anything involving alpha-
transparency, e.g. <http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox2/>.

Well, perhaps this article will finally draw some attention to the problem.
Linux shouldn't to be treated like a third-class citizen on the single most
important app. After all many (if not most) developers, the people who
actually build the visible portion of our internet, are doing it on linux.

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quoderat
Ubuntu 8.10 here with Firefox 3.06, got 238 on that benchmark:

Score: 238 Richards: 211 DeltaBlue: 309 Crypto: 246 RayTrace: 203 EarleyBoyer:
309 RegExp: 180

My Firefox is not custom-compiled. However, I am running the profile in a temp
filesystem that runs in main memory (nothing gets written to disk till logout
or reboot).

On Windows, where setting up a RAM filesystem isn't as practical, I get far
worse performance.

I have no idea if this is the difference, but my score is 100 points lower on
Windows.

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ezy
I think this has been reliably chalked up to the fact that windows firefox is
built using PGO, linux currently is not. If setting up wine becomes a hassle,
you might want to just try grabbing the source and building with PGO on (or
grabbing a bin of 3.1)

~~~
smanek
I'm a bit of a compiler neophyte but if profile guided optimizations yield
such a drastic improvement, why doesn't Mozilla (or my distribution via their
package manager) put out binaries that were compiled with PGO?

~~~
krakensden
PGO is pretty new, and it's turned on for the current builds of Firefox 3.1.

I'm guessing it wasn't enabled by Mozilla initially for the usual reasons of
complex packaging problems and low manpower for the Linux version.

Distribution packagers generally aren't that knowledgeable about what they
package, but that probably isn't what's wrong in the specific case of Firefox,
which gets a lot of attention. For Firefox, it's probably the fact that
Mozilla has very specific software requirements, and distributors have been
burned (<http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=368>) in the past by ignoring
them. So... distributions generally don't do much to change what they
distribute as Firefox.

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jrockway
I tried this and got similar results on my 64-bit Debian system. Conqueror
(xulrunner-based) gets 190, Iceweasel scores 181, and the Windows Firefox
under Wine gets 198. (These were the best of five runs for each. The standard
deviation was pretty high for the Wine Firefox.)

Could be a compiler issue. It will be interesting to see how it does with the
JIT compiler enabled, since that should mostly take the system compiler out of
the equation.

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mcav
Firefox appeared at a great time in the browser wars, but it has shown its
age. Its UI paradigm (cross-platform XUL) gives it a disadvantage in speed and
size for individual platforms, which is unfortunate. It seems like FF 3.1 will
show marked improvement, though.

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blackguardx
I'm going to try running firefox under wine tonight. Firefox under linux has
been noticeably slower than its windows counterpart for awhile now.

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ii
Maybe the answer is in Microsoft optimizing compiler? MS compiler may optimize
the same C++ code much better than gcc.

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anthony_barker
why no Konqueror or webkit based browser comparison?

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blasdel
Because it would expose the oddness of the language micro-benchmark: current
Safari with Tracemonkey scores 5x what Firefox 3 does.

