Comments on: firefox 3 sluggish, fedora install notes

By: davidz

davidz — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:08:37 +0000

> I had to turn selinux off in the end ’cause it was
> getting in the way of things [...]

Yeah. Lots of people do that. Myself too. SELinux is a great technology however the policy is way too fine grained for things like Fedora.

This means that people get it wrong. On top of that, the policy centrally maintained. And while the SELinux policy maintainers may be nice guys and smart etc. they are in no way domain experts on all the 10000 different applications in the distro they write policy for.

Maybe one day someone will rewrite the policy, make it approximately 1000 times simpler, make it decentralized (e.g. shipped in upstream packages) and remove the ability to turn SELinux off (how is it not FAIL FAIL FAIL to ship a security technology that can be turned off? My view is that until this happens, then SELinux will continue to be unusable in community/consumer distros.

(That said, SELinux works great for a lot of big enterprises having a team of developers/sysadmins that grok how to write SELinux policy. And the patience to actually test stuff before it’s deployed.)

By: zucchi

zucchi — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 05:35:22 +0000

davidz: Ok, makes some sense, although it looked like a bit of a cpu hit. I had to turn selinux off in the end ’cause it was getting in the way of things I wanted to do (e.g. custom .xsession, or run xterm from the default shipped Xsession …), and it is too complicated to work out.

anders: some laptop ati thing, so nup. I think i’ll look into a webkit based browser on all systems, not just ‘old’ ones, I don’t have any reason to be ‘loyal’ to firefox, it’s a pos that just got worse, although most sites work with it unfortunately.

adam; fedora, no compiz on that box.

By: davidz

davidz — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:30:23 +0000

> I noticed fedora was using nspluginwrapper (not sure why,
> this is only a 32 bit box),

That’s to confine the plug-in using SELinux; e.g. it’s run in a separate process with a locked-down security context

$ ls -lZ /usr/lib64/nspluginwrapper/npviewer.bin
-rwxr-xr-x root root system_u:object_r:nsplugin_exec_t:s0 /usr/lib64/nspluginwrapper/npviewer.bin

that aren’t allowed to do a lot of stuff (e.g. access ~/.mozilla/firefox/* to steal all your passwords / cookies / browsing history). See

http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/17727.html

for some more background. It makes sense in a way; just look at the rather impressive list of security issues with the flash player from Adobe.

By: Adam

Adam — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:13:52 +0000

Firefox is known to be sluggish when switching tabs, at least in Ubuntu, with Compiz enabled.

By: Anders Aagaard

Anders Aagaard — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:03:43 +0000

Any chance you’ve hit http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=114858 ? With an nvidia card firefox3 is insanely slow for me, borderline useless on some pages, and this is on a powerfull system. Tried a 9200 ATI pci card, and it outperformed my 8800GTS by MILES.

I’d look into webkit on an old system, maybe opera 9.5 until webkit is a bit more stable. I have midori installed (webkit based project), EXTREMELY fast compared to firefox, but I had it crash within 5 minutes of usage.

By: Chris Lord

Chris Lord — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 07:57:23 +0000

Agreed on Firefox speed – although I think it’s only the Linux version that suffers so badly. Some interesting graphs here; http://www.linux.com/feature/139212

Mind you, now that you’ve pointed it out, expect rabid Firefox fan-boys to deny any faults :)

By: ac

ac — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 07:30:08 +0000

Actually, Firefox 3.0 has a lot of excessive repaint comparing to Firefox 2.0. Therefore even thought the javascript is faster, for DHTML pages, Firefox 3.0 is slower than firefox 2.0 when things dynamically change inside a loaded page.

see: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=437749