Mon, 04 Jul 2005 @ 23:14 -0400, matthew sporleder said:

> Is it gtk2 apps in general, or just firefox?  I don't recall
> experiencing extra slowness from gtk2 vs gtk1.

gtk2 is slower.  It's doing more, and some of it isn't well optimized.
It has other advantages which might yield more speed, especially in
combination with newer X accelerations and other libraries.

I have yet to get NetBSD machines with the same graphics speed of a
Linux system, so there is another penalty.

One of these days I hope we see more competition in graphics cards, and
more open drivers, along with people realizing there is more than just
Linux out there.  The Linux-only attitude sucks as bad as Windows-only.

Regarding Firefox, somewhere around 1.2-1.4, it finally started running
better for me than other browsers, and seems like a lot of the more
serious memory leaks are fixed now.

However, builds vary so if you have trouble with one, seek another or
make your own build.  The latter isn't always smooth, but there are
guides out there.

Firefox has a lot of dependencies, and sometimes you can get more speed
by eliminating some, or in some cases adding them if they offer more
performance.

Firefox performance also varies by what environment you run it in,
because it has code to detect things like KDE, Gnome, or vanilla X
setups, making use of what it finds.



-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny." --
Unknown]