September 7, 2003

This blog is slow in Mozilla

This blog renders very slowly in the latest nightly builds of Mozilla (and Firebird) compared to e.g. the Mozilla Firebird 0.6 release. This is because of a recent regression that I think should be fixed before Mozilla Firebird 0.7 is released. That's all I have to say right now!

Posted by djst at September 7, 2003 5:56 PM
Comments

It is slow, but at least it works. I can't see how this can block 1.5/0.7.

Without the workaround that causes the slowdown, Mozilla/Firebird are pretty much unusable on Win95/98/ME. Obviously this needs to be fixed properly, but that (AIUI) requires big archtectural changes, which certainly aren't going to happen in the limited time before the releases. Without a proper fix, the choice is crash-causing memory leaks on Win98 and slowness with big images... slowness with big images is a smaller problem.

Posted by: michaell at September 7, 2003 6:51 PM

Don't know how long this has been the case, or if it's related at all, but at the top of this page, where it says "the *bird™ blog", the links to previous entries and main partially obscure the "the *bird™ blog" text.

Just sayin'.

Posted by: Marc R. at September 8, 2003 1:21 AM

and after I wrote all that about how it couldn't be fixed, they have checked in a better workaround for the problem. I haven't tried a newer build yet though myself, so I don't know if it helps your blog...

Posted by: michaell at September 10, 2003 6:00 PM

I tested this page (http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/djst/archives/004018.html) in the 9/10 Firebird build. Scrolling is exill extremely slow, but it's about 3 times faster than in 9/9.

Maybe try using a 1x1 alpha transparent png instead of the 2000x2000 one you use now? Mozilla has optimizations for some uses of 1x1 images.

Posted by: Jesse Ruderman at September 12, 2003 2:36 AM

Or use -moz-opacity instead of a background image.

Posted by: at September 12, 2003 3:48 AM

nm, -moz-opacity wouldn't work.

Posted by: at September 12, 2003 3:56 AM