So, today I was using Firefox 2.0.0.12 on my Ubuntu machine accessing my usual array of webpages, including gmail and Google Reader. I noticed that my whole machine was feeling really, really slow. Turns out Firefox was really hammering my processors (yes, plural…), presumably thanks to the Javascript-y stuff on gmail and reader since the problem subsided when I closed those pages, even though it didn’t go away completely. Now, I’ve seen Firefox get pretty sluggish if left open too long before thanks to its’ many memory leaks, but never this bad. It got to the point that it was pretty unusable.
So, I decided to install Epiphany, the default Gnome web browser. Now, I’ve used Epiphany before and it had some pretty big rendering problems. So far today, no problems at all. And you know what? It feels substantially faster, a lot faster than Firefox. And the Javascript stuff on gmail and reader isn’t hammering my machine into oblivion.
Will I stop using Firefox? Probably not, there are a lot of extensions for it that I find pretty integral to my work, like the Web Author add-on and Firebug and a few others that slip my mind at the moment. I will, however, probably start using Epiphany for my normal browsing needs if it continues to perform well and Firefox continues to perform so poorly.
