Speed Up Ubuntu Firefox — For Real!

by Chris June 29, 2009 5 comments

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

Disclaimer: 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.

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5 comments »

  • What the heck does “re-source the file” mean???

    jorge said on June 30, 2009 at 4:27 pm

  • Just open a terminal and type “source .bashrc” or “source .bash_profile” in the correct directory. If that doesn’t work for you, just restart your session. :)

    Chris Nelson (author) said on June 30, 2009 at 4:53 pm

  • This thing works!!! Now I can have a gajillion tabs open on my old ass machine and firefox actually responds in a normal timeframe!!!

    Jason said on June 30, 2009 at 4:55 pm

  • Unfortunately, it doesn’t make a differences to my Firefox installation on Jaunty. I infact set the variable in the /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.11/firefox.sh. From what I see, font smoothing is still in place; I don’t see any peformance improvements either!

    Jeenu said on July 1, 2009 at 9:35 am

  • Hmm. I guess the age of your computer and whether you are running 32 vs 64 bit Ubuntu might also play a factor. My coworkers and I noticed a sizable difference on our single core 64 bit AMD systems, and I noticed a big difference on my personal laptop (another 64 bit AMD, but dual core). The biggest difference is in the responsiveness of multiple tab operations (ie: ctrl + clicking a bunch of articles to read, and then cycling through the tabs while they load).

    If your computer is pretty phatty, you might not notice the initial slowdown at all.

    Chris Nelson (author) said on July 1, 2009 at 10:04 am

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