Speed Up Ubuntu Firefox — For Real!

So I was getting a bit frustrated with the responsiveness of my Ubuntu Firefox when compared to the Firefox installed on my Windows machine. I’d tried everything I could find, from about:config tweaks to disabling IPv6 support, but still Firefox remained one area where the Windows experience was actually noticeably faster.

So I did some further research. Turns out the default installed version of Ubuntu’s Firefox has Pango, a font and script smoothing library, enabled by default. I’m all for smooth fonts, but it appears Pango can slow down Firefox’s performances by as much as 45%.

But don’t just take my word for it. Check out some complaints from other people regarding Pango.

To disable pango, just add the following line to your .bashrc or .bash_profile file (located in your home directory):

export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1

Re-source the file and restart Firefox to get a noticeable increase in speed.

-Chris

Note: This fix affects the default, packaged installation of Firefox on Ubuntu installations. If you’ve upgraded your Firefox install manually (ie: upgrading to this week’s release of Firefox 3.5), you most likely won’t have Pango enabled at all.

Further Note: I found that some of my speed issues had to do with an installation of ubuntu 64 bit on a machine with only 2 gigs of memory. If you’re on a resource-constrained machine, this fix might provide a noticeable benefit. If you’re already running 32 bit linux, or 64 bit with 4 or more gigs of memory, you probably won’t notice any difference.