If you are using RC1 on the N900, do yourself a favor and turn off disk caching. Set the preference “browser.cache.disk.enable” to false:
- Navigate to “about:config”.
- In the Filter field, type in “disk” to narrow the results down.
- Carefully tap the one that says “browser.cache.disk.enable” and press Enter on your keyboard. The preference should become bold.
- Restart your browser.
Sometime after beta 5, we’ve known that there was a regression with loading pages. After releasing RC1, our fellow hacker Doug solved the mystery: in beta 5, Firefox’s disk cache had effectively been turned off for the N900. We “fixed” the problem in RC1 and caused a major regression in page loading performance. Here’s the bug if you want to track it.
This is a band-aid solution for 1.0. Ultimately we want disk caching to happen outside of the main thread so that Firefox stays snappy during page load.
Thanks man! It works like a charm!
Hey, I’ve done that and now Firefox won’t start. It opens up, loads for a bit and then goes away. Any ideas what happened?
Even with this option disabled, Fennec is still unusably slow and unresponsive on N900. Sorry. :(
@Thijs: Great to hear!
@Dreixel: You may have a hung Firefox. We’ve had a couple of reports of this recently. Would you mind rebooting your phone and seeing if Firefox starts up?
@Luarvique: I’m sorry to hear that :( Performance and responsiveness are our #1 priorities in these upcoming quarters, so I hope you give us another shot soon.
Well, that’s *better*, but things like side-to-side panning to get the controls up still are very jerky (compared to the built in Mozilla-derived browser), using Facebook as a fairly typical example.
Most evident while the page is still loading, but still there.
“and then goes away”
Open the X Terminal and run
ps -efw|grep fennec
if it reports anything other than ‘grep’ or nothing, run
killall fennec
to really exit Mobile Firefox.
Had this happen to me a few times, as you can tell :-)
Better, loading times seem a little faster and once loaded the page is scrollable acceptably, however MicroB still has the edge on both speed and scrolling.
Thankyou for the tip however
Appreciate the tip. Firefox is definitely faster now but others have stated it’s still lagging behind the default browser in terms of general performance. The pages load fast but everything else seems a tad sluggish.
[...] (RC1), aún me parecía demasiado lenta para ser usable… esto fue, basicamente hasta que me encontre con este post, donde explican como desactivar la opción de “disk cache”. Básicamente hay que entrar [...]
Well, I still keep Fennec installed and even update it on weekly basis, but it is currently a huge disappointment. At least, decouple the UI and the loading/rendering engine!
@Benjamin: Rebooting worked.
@Luarvique: Internally we’ve been calling this decoupling “electrolysis.” We are aiming for a release of Fennec with electrolysis in late second quarter. Here’s a couple of related links, if a little outdated, on some of our initial progress:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Content_Processes
http://benjamin.smedbergs.us/blog/2009-10-30/multi-process-fennec/
Tried the RC2 of firefox though it is better than RC1, it still makes the phone very sluggish and i have to kill it to make the phone more responsive. But the syncing of bookmarks using weave rocks. But still the browser is unusable for daily usage due to the sluggishness :(