firefox slow rendering (e.g. wikipedia)

[Greg Trounson]

Ian Malone wrote:
> Okay, I've had this problem for a while and I'm beginning
> to wonder why.
> 
> Firefox sometimes responds very slowly, especially when
> rendering Wikipedia and a few other pages (mostly wikis
> actually). I don't mean connecting to the internet, I mean
> responding to the user; e.g. I run a mouse gestures
> extension which can become unusable with a couple
> of Wikipedia tabs open. Booting the same machine into
> Windows Me and running Firefox I don't have this problem.
> System is FC5, Athlon 1.3GHz, 1GB RAM, GeForce 3 Ti200
> with Nvidia drivers.
> 
...

Not sure if this will address your particular problem but on every Fedora machine I 
consider it mandatory to launch firefox with MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO set.  Otherwise the Fedora 
build of FF uses the abomination that is pango to render text, slowing down rendering 
considerably.

To see if you're using pango type about: in your location bar.
If you see something like this:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.8) Gecko/20061108 Fedora/1.5.0.8-1.fc5 
Firefox/1.5.0.8

If the word "pango" is present then you'd best take action.

Some people recommend uncommenting the lines:
# MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1
# export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO
in /usr/bin/firefox which will do for the time being, but bear in mind you'll need to 
repeat that every time you do a FF update.

I have export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1 in /etc/profile to take care of it once and for all.

best regards,
Greg