The real reason Firefox was renamed to Iceweasel
Today I had yet another phone conversation with a developer of a commercial web content filter. While trying to track down bugs I was cursing my firef^H^H^H^H^Hiceweasel for being so slow. The Linux-Magazin recently tested several common browsers. Among them the Firefox, IE and Opera. They said that Firefox is still a bit slower than IE but when I look at my browser when surfing the web I wonder what kind of supercomputer I need to buy to make it usable. I have accepted that Firefox on Linux is slower than Firefox on Windows. And I also came to accept that on KDE it takes ages (up to a minute) to open the Gtk file dialog to save images, pages or downloads somewhere. (Do they intend to persuade me to Gnome?) Recently I “strace”d this monster and it looks like Firefox is interested in my timeofday() every few microseconds. Does it need a wristwatch? Trying Opera I saw how fast browsing the web can be. But since Opera doesn’t have those nice add-ons that I run on Firefox it’s nice for a speed test but otherwise not really my browser of choice. (Check out the “Web Developer” or “Firebug” add-ons if you don’t know them yet.) On some AJAX-overloaded websites my system load is 0.5 even though I’m not even on the virtual desktop where Firefox lives. If only I knew if this is a common problem or if my system is ready for a reinstall. Or perhaps it’s called iceweasel because it’s close to freezing my system