The scrolling/browsing is significantly slower (more sluggish) in the "Gentoo-built" version of mozilla-firefox compared to www-client/mozilla-firefox-bin (precompiled version). I have no idea why, but it's really annoying. One should think a modern laptop (Pentium-m 1.86GHz, 2GB RAM) is fast enough to scroll properly through most web pages without the browser hitching and coughing. As a result of this I have to use mozilla-firefox-bin, which performs well in comparison. There's a difference between fonts as well: mozilla-firefox-bin does not seem to honour the fact that I've disabled anti-aliasing for fonts in the range 7-9, but mozilla-firefox does (It's the UI font). This leads me to believe that they are certainly built differently. Testing was against the same profile, smooth-scrolling always disabled. I'm using xorg-7.0 with the Intel 810 driver (Intel 915GM chipset). Other apps (including other GTK2 apps like Eclipse) perform just fine. I'm running KDE 3.5.4. Portage 2.1-r1 (default-linux/x86/2006.0, gcc-3.4.6, glibc-2.3.6-r4, 2.6.17-gentoo-r5 i686) ================================================================= System uname: 2.6.17-gentoo-r5 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.86GHz Gentoo Base System version 1.6.15 app-admin/eselect-compiler: [Not Present] dev-lang/python: 2.4.3-r1 dev-python/pycrypto: 2.0.1-r5 dev-util/ccache: [Not Present] dev-util/confcache: [Not Present] sys-apps/sandbox: 1.2.17 sys-devel/autoconf: 2.13, 2.59-r7 sys-devel/automake: 1.4_p6, 1.5, 1.6.3, 1.7.9-r1, 1.8.5-r3, 1.9.6-r2 sys-devel/binutils: 2.16.1-r3 sys-devel/gcc-config: 1.3.13-r3 sys-devel/libtool: 1.5.22 virtual/os-headers: 2.6.11-r2 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86" AUTOCLEAN="yes" CBUILD="i686-pc-linux-gnu" CFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium-m -pipe" CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/kde/3.5/env /usr/kde/3.5/share/config /usr/kde/3.5/shutdown /usr/share/X11/xkb /usr/share/config" CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/env.d /etc/env.d/java/ /etc/gconf /etc/java-config/vms/ /etc/revdep-rebuild /etc/terminfo" CXXFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium-m -pipe" DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles" FEATURES="autoconfig distlocks metadata-transfer sandbox sfperms strict" GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://mirror.gentoo.no/ " LANG="nb_NO.UTF-8" PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages" PORTAGE_RSYNC_OPTS="--recursive --links --safe-links --perms --times --compress --force --whole-file --delete --delete-after --stats --timeout=180 --exclude='/distfiles' --exclude='/local' --exclude='/packages'" PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp" PORTDIR="/usr/portage" PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/portage" SYNC="rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage" USE="x86 X acpi alsa apache2 arts avi berkdb bitmap-fonts cdr cli crypt cups dlloader dri dvd emacs emboss encode fam firefox flac foomaticdb fortran gdbm gif gtk gtk2 hal howl imlib ipv6 isdnlog jpeg kde kdeenablefinal ldap libg++ libwww mad mikmod mmx mmxext motif mp3 mpeg ncurses nls nptl nsplugin ogg opengl pam pcre pdf pdflib perl png pppd python qt qt3 quicktime readline reflection samba sdl session spell spl sse sse2 ssl tcpd truetype truetype-fonts type1-fonts udev unicode vorbis win32codecs xcomposite xine xml xorg xv zlib elibc_glibc input_devices_synaptics input_devices_mouse input_devices_keyboard input_devices_evdev kernel_linux userland_GNU video_cards_i810" Unset: CTARGET, EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS, INSTALL_MASK, LC_ALL, LDFLAGS, LINGUAS, MAKEOPTS, PORTAGE_RSYNC_EXTRA_OPTS
www-client/mozilla-firefox-1.5.0.6 use flags: USE="ipv6 -debug -gnome -java -mozdevelop -xinerama -xprint" No extra languages.
It is caused by pango library. --enable-xft --disable-pango should be used with configure script. some .eclass file should be changed.
(In reply to comment #2) > It is caused by pango library. > --enable-xft --disable-pango should be used with configure script. > some .eclass file should be changed. > first the patches from bug141344 should be applied before you could do this change, and even after that it should be optional as there are people, who use the pango rendering for complex languages for now one could use the MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1 firefox
Thanks, MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1 did the trick. I can't believe the slowness of that library. IMHO, Pango text rendering shouldn't be enabled by default. For _most_ people it just makes the browser a much slower beast. Official Firefox builds obviously don't use it yet, so why should Gentoo ? At least, it should be a USE flag (-pango +xft for me).
because mozilla failed to address bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=305185 for 1.5 although they knew of this issue, but their own builds do not use gtk+-2.8, so it was not a problem for their own builds as they are static. so now this was resolved in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=338446 and one more bug correctly and should hope that the next 2.0 beta could include the the pango useflags back.
There is a use flag, 'moznopango'. Some locales don't support disabling pango though. Resolving as upstream.
