Firefox: Disabling PANGO helps improve FF speed
I have quite a decent notebook with 2GB RAM but run under Ubuntu 9.04, my Firefox 3+ seems to wear down my whole system. Thus I googled around the net to find a solution and … tataa! Here it is:
Just add the line
export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1 firefox
to your environment (e.g. .bashrc in your home directory). I noticed a VAST speed improvement (combined with the FasterFox Lite addon for FF).
How does it work and what are the setbacks?
PANGO is used to render content inside Firefox but it also seems (due to bugs in xrender and cairo but that is hearsay) to slow the whole system down massively. To which extent this workaround may impair your browsing experience I cannot say but if it does, simply take out the line from your environment, restart FF and you’re set again.
I do not take responsibility for any shit you do to your system and/or if anything breaks – you do these changes on your own and are responsible for breaking stuff – don’t blame me, I told you.
