Firefox on Ubuntu can be soooo slooow
February 12, 2007Even though I generally like Ubuntu Linux, I must say that Firefox has been a major disappointment. On this very same hardware, when it had Windows XP running IE 7, JavaScript-powered sites like Google Documents ran just fine. But now, running Ubuntu Linux with Firefox 2, those same sites are unbelievably slow.
In fact, Google Documents is so slow it’s almost impossible to use. You click on a menu button and then have to sit around waiting for it to finally draw the menu on the screen. But the same documents were fine under IE7, on this very same piece of hardware.
So I know it isn’t the hardware’s fault, nor do I think it’s the OS either. Ubuntu is plenty fast in everything else I’ve been using it for. Oracle JDeveloper runs just as well under Ubuntu as it did on XP. To paraphrase Spike Lee, it’s gotta be da browser.
I’ve tried Opera but Google does a browser check and won’t allow Documents to run on the browser. So I’m stuck with Firefox apparently. I wish I was a better programmer because I’d poke around in the source code and see if I could figure out why scripted sites are so slow on this thing.