Ian:
Are you running on Sparc? There is a known issue with Firefox being
slow if you don't have Xrender running. On Sparc, the Xrender extension
is off by default. You need to add an argument to the Xserver launch
command to turn it on.
If you do this, I think Firefox on Sparc is much faster. However, only
certain graphics cards support XRender on Sparc, so it won't work for
some graphics cards.
Here is more detail...
On Sparc machines starting with Nevada build 65, the Xrender extension
is now supported with the Xsun Xserver if you are using one of the
following graphics cards:
m64, ffb, afb and XVR-100
[ there could be more by now, not sure ]
The use of Xrender makes a significant performance improvement when
using GNOME, so it is recommended that users take advantage of this
by turning this extension on.
For Xrender to work the graphics card must support depths of 1, 4, 8 and
32. So run xdpyinfo and verify that all depths are listed as supported
in the "supported pixmap formats" section. If so, then add the
"+xrender" argument to the Xserver command. You can do this by doing
the following:
- See if you are using CDE login or GDM:
Run "svcs cde-login gdm"
This will show you two lines of output listing both services and
will show one is enabled and one is disabled. If cde-login is
enabled you are using CDE login, and if gdm is enabled you are
using GDM.
- If using CDE login as your login program:
Edit /usr/dt/config/Xservers
At the end of this file, you should see a line that looks similar to
the following:
:0 Local local_uid at console root /usr/X11/bin/Xserver :0 -nobanner
Add +xrender to the end of the command after "-nobanner".
- If using GDM as your login program:
Edit /etc/X11/gdm/custom.conf
Note that the end of this file has the following comment:
# Also note, that if you redefine a [server-foo] section, then GDM
# will use the definition in this file, not the GDM System Defaults
# configuration file. It is currently not possible to disable a
# [server-foo] section defined in the GDM System Defaults
# configuration file.
Add the following lines after the above comment (with no leading
spaces):
[server-Standard]
name=Standard server
command=/usr/X11/bin/Xserver -audit 0 +xrender
flexible=true
---
Brian
> Build 95 has Firefox 3.0.
>
> The biggest problem with it is it can take a very long time to load a
> page and unlike Firefox 2, all tabs block while it is loading. I run a
> lot of JsUnit tests and I've had to extend the page load timeout to
> avoid failures.
>
> Ian
>
> _______________________________________________
> desktop-discuss mailing list
> desktop-discuss at opensolaris.org
