Opera > Firefox in Ubuntu

[SickBeast]

I don't know if I'm doing something wrong, but FireFox is incredibly sluggish for me under Ubuntu. Scrolling pages up and down with the wheel is slow and lacks responsiveness.

Opera 10 does not suffer this problem for me, and loads up pages faster to boot.

I just thought I would share this.

 

[Brainonska511]

I found Firefox was only sluggish when I had "Smooth Scrolling" enabled.

 

[xSauronx]

FF was acting funky for me last night, kept locking up and i dont know why. works fine today.

i agree about opera, ive always thought it loaded pages faster....but no plugins, so meh.

 

[NoShangriLa]

FF was a bit buggy for me in Mint 6, and after the update FF ran just as good as Opera.

IMHO, Opera really shine under Windows over FF, Chrome, and IE.

 

[Nothinman]

I just can't get by the fact that Opera uses QT on Linux.

 

[SickBeast]

I finally figured out that Java and JavaScript were bringing my FireFox to its knees.

Are there alternate Java engines/plugins that will help to alleviate this?

I can run without Java, but I miss out on some neat graphs and stuff.

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
I just can't get by the fact that Opera uses QT on Linux.

What's QT and what does this mean?

 

[Nothinman]

What's QT and what does this mean?

It's the UI toolkit, QT is used by KDE while GTK is used by Gnome. Because Opera uses QT it looks different (uglier IMO) and doesn't fit in with the rest of my Gnome/GTK apps.

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

What's QT and what does this mean?

It's the UI toolkit, QT is used by KDE while GTK is used by Gnome. Because Opera uses QT it looks different (uglier IMO) and doesn't fit in with the rest of my Gnome/GTK apps.

I like it personally. I just don't like the small fonts on the menus and such. The blazing fast performance makes up for all shortcomings. Firefox has just been too bogged down for me under Ubuntu. In XP it's great.

 

[NoShangriLa]

It all come down to how well the developer implement QT or GTK because they both have their pro & con.

This post is from Opera 10 Alpha & it work great in Mint 6, much snappier than 9.x or FF, except that it lacks Flash because I don't want to install it permenantly on my sys.

 

[Nothinman]

It all come down to how well the developer implement QT or GTK because they both have their pro & con.

No, it comes down to personal preference and integration. There's some workarounds to make one fit in better with the other but it's never seamless.

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

It all come down to how well the developer implement QT or GTK because they both have their pro & con.

No, it comes down to personal preference and integration. There's some workarounds to make one fit in better with the other but it's never seamless.

Yeah I find the difference in speed from Firefox to Opera quite remarkable under Linux. It's not as pronounced under Windows.

 

[Nothinman]

Yeah I find the difference in speed from Firefox to Opera quite remarkable under Linux. It's not as pronounced under Windows.

I'm not talking about performance, I'm just talking about look and feel. I generally stick to Galeon and Epiphany in Linux so FF's bulkiness doesn't bother me.

 

[cKGunslinger]

FF has really slowed down for me (could be a rogue addon, I guess) in Ubuntu over the last few weeks/months. I'd use Opera, but I get this crap, 10-20 second pause when going to a new website, every time.

 

[NoShangriLa]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Yeah I find the difference in speed from Firefox to Opera quite remarkable under Linux. It's not as pronounced under Windows.

I'm not talking about performance, I'm just talking about look and feel. I generally stick to Galeon and Epiphany in Linux so FF's bulkiness doesn't bother me.

Sure that they both have their differences, but IMHO its really come down to how well the developers implement things.

Gnome was my preference for quite a long time in the early days, then for a while I prefered XFCE & Fluxbox, then for a short period of time I enjoyed KDE for its eyes candies, and I'm now back to Gnome.

PS. I always liked Galeon but never really care much for Epiphany. I also like Dillo & have use it as a backup now & again, but lately I haven't use it much.

 

[Nothinman]

Sure that they both have their differences, but IMHO its really come down to how well the developers implement things.

But when things like the file and print dialogs look drastically different it doesn't matter what the application developers do unless they write their own which is stupid in it's own ways.

 

[skyking]

I never took a stopwatch to it but opera always touted iteself as the fastest browser. It certainly kicked IE's ass all over the place for many years.

 

[xcript]

Opera is faster for me, until any flash loads; then it performs very poorly.

 

[Fox5]

Firefox is pretty sluggish under ubuntu for some reason.
It's really slow with lots of windows open too. I suspect this might be related to the poor performance of flash, but it seems to poll each window at a set interval, lagging the entire system.

Opera is way faster under Ubuntu, except for flash and javascript though. Those have pretty abysmal performance, but it works better on non-animated web pages and having lots of windows open. I suspect firefox's issues could be due to the older version included with ubuntu. It might be worthwhile to uninstall it and manually install a .deb of the latest version. The firefox auto-updater will take over, rather than using synaptic.

Also, I think Ubuntu uses the open source version of Java by default. It's likely slower than the commercial version. (note, javascript has no relation to java...though newer versions of firefox bring vastly improved javascript performance, thus the recommendation of the .deb)