firefox slow rendering (e.g. wikipedia)

[Ian Malone]

Greg Trounson wrote:
> Ian Malone wrote:
>> Okay, I've had this problem for a while and I'm beginning
>> to wonder why.
>>
>> Firefox sometimes responds very slowly, especially when
>> rendering Wikipedia and a few other pages (mostly wikis
>> actually). I don't mean connecting to the internet, I mean
>> responding to the user; e.g. I run a mouse gestures
>> extension which can become unusable with a couple
>> of Wikipedia tabs open. Booting the same machine into
>> Windows Me and running Firefox I don't have this problem.
>> System is FC5, Athlon 1.3GHz, 1GB RAM, GeForce 3 Ti200
>> with Nvidia drivers.
>>
> ...
> 
> Not sure if this will address your particular problem but on every 
> Fedora machine I consider it mandatory to launch firefox with 
> MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO set.  Otherwise the Fedora build of FF uses the 
> abomination that is pango to render text, slowing down rendering 
> considerably.
> 
> To see if you're using pango type about: in your location bar.
> If you see something like this:
> Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.8) Gecko/20061108 
> Fedora/1.5.0.8-1.fc5 Firefox/1.5.0.8
> 
> If the word "pango" is present then you'd best take action.
> 
> Some people recommend uncommenting the lines:
> # MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1
> # export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO
> in /usr/bin/firefox which will do for the time being, but bear in mind 
> you'll need to repeat that every time you do a FF update.
> 
> I have export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1 in /etc/profile to take care of it 
> once and for all.
> 

I think that has improved matters a little, thanks for the
suggestion.

I've also had a go at the Firefox 2.0 binary from Mozilla,
(the 1.5.0.8 won't work for me), and it is much more
responsive.

-- 
imalone