Browser benchmarks: even Wine beats Linux Firefox
tuxradar.com
tuxradar.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
What this misses, and what is the real problem with Firefox on Linux, is rendering performance. XRender, as far as I know, is not quite where it should be. There are two ways to accelerate it, EXA and XAA, and their performance varies greatly by point release of each driver. Throw in compositing, with a different set of interactions across drivers and acceleration architectures, and the whole gamut of misconfigured distributions, and you get an unspeakable mess.
It would be nice if X.org could finish undoing the damage of XFree86's latter days, and get the drivers stable enough that distributors could figure out how to package them properly. Then maybe somebody could do something about the generally unpleasant and slow Linux GUI experience.
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.