Firefox/Linux observation

[smirk]

I installed Ubuntu on a 4-5 year old Dell laptop last night just to check it out, and noticed that Firefox seems way too fast for what I'm used to. This was only a subjective test, of course, but web pages seemed to snap onto the screen with virtually no rendering delay. I only spent a few minutes looking at it, but has anyone else experienced that? I swear, pages seemed to appear more quickly than on my Core i7 iMac. It doesn't make sense.

 

[r0k]

I installed Ubuntu on a 4-5 year old Dell laptop last night just to check it out, and noticed that Firefox seems way too fast for what I'm used to. This was only a subjective test, of course, but web pages seemed to snap onto the screen with virtually no rendering delay. I only spent a few minutes looking at it, but has anyone else experienced that? I swear, pages seemed to appear more quickly than on my Core i7 iMac. It doesn't make sense.

What version of FF? What browser do you run on your i7 Mac? If you are running FF on OS X, this is understandable because I have found FF on OS X to be the slowest of FF on any platform. But if you are running Chrome or Safari on OS X and FF on your old Dell is still faster, that is puzzling.

Many web pages today have only 15K of text and 300K of javascript, much of which comes from google analytics and doubleclick.net. I also suggest an ad blocker plugin to speed things up.

 

[Consultant]

Browser on any newly OS re-installed computer can be "fast".

 

[smirk]

The latest version of Firefox, and the latest version of Safari on the Mac.

But you know what? You might have nailed it. I do use Safari Adblock on the Mac, and I think it induces a noticeable slowdown. I also use Adblock on FF, but on the Ubuntu laptop I hadn't yet installed it, so maybe that was the difference. There's also the difference in how different OSes "feel". For example, Windows always feels "snappier" to me than OS X, but OS X always feels more "fluid" than Windows. I have no experience with how Ubuntu feels, though.