[wplug] is firefox on linux just really slow with animations?

Patrick Wagstrom patrick at wagstrom.net
Fri Nov 9 12:35:21 EST 2007


I'm currently prepping a book review for "The Open Pitt" on AJAX fun.  At
first I thought that the scripts were poor because some of the image
related scripts were really slow, but then I decided to see how the pages
looked in IE under VMWare and they pages came up, animated nicely and
provided a great effect.

So here's my question: are effects such as layer fades and element resizing
on firefox for linux really slow everywhere, or just on my computer?

So, if you've got a minute visit the following two web sites and do the
following tests:

http://script.aculo.us/

Do the bubbles on the page pop up nice an quickly, or does it remind you of
an Apple ][e trying to render the graphics line by line?

http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox2/

Click on Image Set (second row of pictures).  Does the lightbox come up
smoothly?  Does it resize nicely when you press the arrow keys?


Here's my results:
              script.aculo.us       lightbox
IE 7 (win)        smooth             smooth
Firefox 2 (win)   smooth             smooth
Safari (win)      smooth             smooth
Firefox 2 (linux) apple][e           apple][e
Opera 9 (linux)   apple][gs          apple][gs
Epiphany (linux)  apple][e           apple][e
Konqueror (linux) apple][gs          smooth

So what gives?  Firefox is clearly capable of rendering the pages nicely on
this machine, because the VMWare install of firefox works fine.  Likewise,
on the lightbox site, Konqueror works fine.  But for most of the other
stuff, Linux sucks -- running the apps in VMWare is faster.

So, anyone got a stab at this?  Is it just something with this machine?

--Patrick


More information about the wplug mailing list