Firefox Faster In Wine Than Native

An anonymous reader writes "Tuxradar did some benchmarks comparing Firefox's Windows and Linux JavaScript performance. 'We did some simple JavaScript benchmarks of Firefox 3.0 using Windows and Linux to see how it performed across the platforms — and the results are pretty bleak for Linux.' Later on, they tried Wine. 'The end result: Firefox from Mozilla or from Fedora has almost nil speed difference, and Firefox running on Wine is faster than native Firefox.'"

Comments

Why not?

[brunes69]

For everyone else in the world who does not know what PGO is maybe some details on why it is not enabled would be helpful.

Re:Why not?

[somenickname]

The idea is for the linker to identify the hot spots in memory, and group as many of them together as possible so they live on common pages. This helps keep those pages from being swapped out of memory to disk due to disuse, which greatly reduces the amount of thrashing your end users will see during normal use. Less thrashing == improved performance.

You were correct until here. This isn't PGO's primary purpose. It may do this to prevent TLB misses but, certainly not to lessen the impact of swapping (which for an average desktop linux user is almost non-existent). Optimization is about making decisions about what is likely to produce the fastest code. If the compiler knows how the code is going to be used, it can make better decisions.

Firefox is slow on Linux in general

[Teckla]

I dual boot between Windows XP and Ubuntu GNU/Linux (of the Intrepid Ibex flavor).

Firefox is slow on Linux in general. Page Up, Page Down, Arrow Up, Arrow Down, Ctrl+Plus and Ctrl+Minus (to increase and decrease the font size)...all of these things are instantaneous on Windows XP, but there's a noticeable lag on Linux.

I'm not sure what the problem is. I'm using the proprietary ATI drivers on Linux, which should be pretty fast. And my machine is old enough that all the kinks should have been worked out of the Linux drivers for my hardware.

Re:Firefox is slow on Linux in general

[QCompson]

Yep, I have the same experience. Firefox operations are much, much slower in linux than in windows. Another example is tab switching. In XP/Vista it is instantaneous, but in linux there is a slight delay. Things like this make the GUI feel very sluggish (I'm using the nvidia driver btw).

Though Not Dramatic, Interesting Nonetheless

[filesiteguy]

I think it stands as a testamant to the WINE folks. I know Linux distros and the various Window Managers - KDE/Xfce/IceWM/Gnome - have to handle things that Wintendo doesn't, as it is integrated into the OS from the get-go.

However, the results are not that dramatic. I'd be curious to see a few things, including how Native FF runs in KDE with the Gnome libraries loading up. (I run KDE.)

Also of note - I've posted before on lists that "starting" Word 2003 takes about half the time as it does to "start" OpenOffice 2.x on my distribution. I run CrossoverOffice and have Office 2003 loaded. My guess is that there may be something in Wine that optimizes these processes.

Re:You not thinking Milti-Core.

[akadruid]

Laptops in particular often have slow hard drives. Antivirus slows them further. You're probably waiting for the disk all the time.

It's often compounded in a business environment by other disk access apps (auditing etc).

I know on my laptop, lauching firefox involves McAfee scanning Firefox, then Centennial scanning Firefox, then McAfee scanning Centennial, then McAfee scanning Firefox again.