[wch]

I'm running Ubuntu 9.04, and I haven't been able to find a web browser that performs as well as ones in Windows. For example, even just typing this message, there are little pauses every few seconds. Javascript-heavy pages, like gmail and Google docs, often have a noticeable lag simply scrolling or typing -- those sites aren't very responsive enough even on a fast computer, so any speed boost helps

I do have Windows XP installed on this machine, and although I haven't run it in a while, I seem to recall Firefox and Chrome being much faster than things seem to be in Linux.

Right now I'm running Firefox 3.5b4pre on this machine, and while it's an improvement over 3.0, it's still not as fast as I'd like. Are there any faster options, or is this as good as it gets?

[Sam111111]

I've read that Opera is the fastest, though I haven't tried it myself.

[reflex]

To speed up Firefox in general, I'd recommend turning off the disk cache or moving it to a RAM disk. And setting "toolkit.storage.synchronous" to "0" to reduce disk activity. But I don't have any JavaScript-specific recommendations.

[civickiller302]

In my experience Firefox has been the best.....for now....but just wait to Googe Chrome comes out for linux...

In the meantime...check out this site. It gives some great step by step info I would highly recommend to speed up your browser.

Ubuntu on the Dell Mini 9: Customizing Firefox for Netbooks

[iggykoopa]

you can try out chrome on ubuntu here https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa it runs pretty fast and is decent, but I haven't got flash working on it and it's not even beta quality yet so there are some issues. Give it a try though, I've been impressed with it.

[Sam111111]

I just installed Opera, to follow up my last post ... and I'm pretty impressed.

[wch]

Well, I decided to try out the Google V8 Javascript benchmark with a number of different browsers: V8 Benchmark Suite

Here are the results, from fastest to slowest, on the Dell Mini 9. The entry labeled "Score" is the average of all the individual tests below.


Chromium 2.0.182.0 (0) Ubuntu 9.04, Dell Mini
Score: 673
Richards: 860
DeltaBlue: 679
Crypto: 692
RayTrace: 683
EarleyBoyer: 1315
RegExp: 256

Arora 0.6 Ubuntu 9.04, Dell Mini
Score: 398
Richards: 805
DeltaBlue: 424
Crypto: 759
RayTrace: 261
EarleyBoyer: 823
RegExp: 71.5

Firefox 3.5b4 Linux Ubuntu 9.04, Dell Mini
Score: 53.0
Richards: 49.3
DeltaBlue: 18.2
Crypto: 174
RayTrace: 40.6
EarleyBoyer: 68.7
RegExp: 50.9

Firefox 3.5b4 in Wine 1.1.21, Ubuntu 9.04, Dell Mini
Score: 50.6
Richards: 42.7
DeltaBlue: 51.6
Crypto: 26.6
RayTrace: 65.6
EarleyBoyer: 87.2
RegExp: 49.9

Opera 9.64 Build 2480 Ubuntu 9.04, Dell Mini
Score: 47.5
Richards: 33.5
DeltaBlue: 41.1
Crypto: 32.8
RayTrace: 104
EarleyBoyer: 169
RegExp: 14.5

Firefox 3.0.10 Linux Ubuntu 9.04, Dell Mini
Score: 45.0
Richards: 50.9
DeltaBlue: 60.2
Crypto: 33.9
RayTrace: 34.7
EarleyBoyer: 62.2
RegExp: 36.9

===============
For comparison, here are scores from my Macbook:


Safari 4 Public Beta (5528.16), Mac OS X, Macbook 2GHz Core 2 Duo
Score: 1520
Richards: 2527
DeltaBlue: 1790
Crypto: 2373
RayTrace: 1349
EarleyBoyer: 2772
RegExp: 307


Firefox 3.5b4, Mac OS X, Macbook 2GHz Core 2 Duo
Score: 258
Richards: 1315
DeltaBlue: 66.8
Crypto: 630
RayTrace: 139
EarleyBoyer: 230
RegExp: 168

===============

Chromium is by far the fastest, but it crashes too much to be my main browser. Arora has excellent Javascript performance, but it doesn't feel faster than Firefox 3.5b4 when using Gmail. For now I might use Chromium for email and Firefox 3.5b4 for everything else...

I ran the Windows version of Firefox 3.5b4 in Wine and it worked fine but wasn't much different from the rest. I tried running Chrome (the official Windows version) in Wine, but it unfortunately wouldn't load any pages.