Re: Re: Firefox/Iceweasel 3: agony of the snail

[Jim McCloskey <mcclosk@ucsc.edu>]

On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 12:24 AM, Jim McCloskey <mcclosk@ucsc.edu>
wrote:

> An upgrade to testing this afternoon unexpectedly brought me
> Firefox/Iceweasel 3.0, which was fairly exciting. Here, though, it is
> just agonizingly slow---10-12 seconds between clicking `Bookmarks' in
> the Toolbar and the display of the menu. 

Thanks very much to everyone who responded and my apologies for my own 
slowness in response (many commitments yesterday). 

I don't use a display-manager so the FF3 problem is unrelated to that. I 
had re-booted a number of times in trying to debug this problem, so the 
problem is also unrelated to that.  

But it's now clear where the problem lies. I have been using 
the proprietary ATI drivers  (fglrx-driver, fglrx-glx, and fglrx-kernel-src 
as packaged for Debian). This is because I made the mistake of buying a 
('linux-ready') Thinkpad T60 with an ATI graphics adapter (the V5200) rather 
than an Intel graphics adapter, and I have regretted the mistake ever since. 
The proprietary ATI drivers have been a constant source of headaches and are 
very buggy.

I just installed the open-source radeonhd driver instead, re-configured and 
restarted X,  and the sluggishness problem with FF3 and Epiphany disappeared. 
So I can add to the list of fglrx-related problems that it interacts very badly 
with the Gecko rendering engine used currently by FF3 and Epiphany.

Unfortunately, the radeonhd driver is still very much in development and it still
lacks many of the features that one might want in a modern video driver---no 3D 
accelation, no XVideo extension, for instance.

So there are still no very good choices for linux users who have made the mistake
of buying a system which includes one of these new ATI adapters. But progress on 
the radeonhd drivers seems to be fairly fast ...

Thanks again to everyone who helped,

Jim