Is Firefox 9.0.1 A Dog? Choppy Scrolling and Other Issues

gadgetwiz · #1 11th January 2012, 09:00 PM

Using Firefox 9.0.1 on Fedora 16, I'm finding it to be very clunky. It's choppy and jerky when scrolling up and down. It seems it's sucking up lots of resources too. I don't have any addons installed.

Opera is very fast when scrolling and just seems snappy overall. I've tried a few search engine searches and some others are reporting a similar issue with Firefox 9.0.1.

I've tried to downgrade to Firefox 8 but there is an older lib dependency so I can't run Firefox 8 in F16 (without downgrading that lib).

I'm running Firefox 8 on Fedora 14 and it's lightning quick when scrolling. A friend of mine installed Firefox 9.0.1 on Fedora 14 and has the same performance issues I'm seeing in F16 (as well as other issues)

Also I'm having lots of problems installing addons in FF9. I click to download and nothing happens. I can't even seem to install a dictionary so I have no spell check (as you can tell).

I'm wondering of anyone else has noticed all this issues with FF9, or is it just me?

marko · #2 11th January 2012, 09:14 PM

I don't have those problems and I have about four machines I've used with Firefox 9

ericthered · #3 11th January 2012, 09:39 PM

You have smooth scrolling enabled right?

Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced

Check the "smooth scrolling" box.

nonamedotc · #4 11th January 2012, 11:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ericthered

You have smooth scrolling enabled right?

Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced

Check the "smooth scrolling" box.

Is there a specific reason why you are suggesting this? I do not have it enabled and I do not have any of the problems that the OP mentions.

gadgetwiz · #5 12th January 2012, 04:39 AM

After some further testing, it seems that Firefox 9.0.1 running under Fedora 16 is causing Xorg to max out the CPU to 100%. This is occurring during scrolling or even when I drag the Firefox Window around. I was alerted to this after noticing that my CPU fan was revving to the max during the periods when Firefox 9 was stalling.

I verified the culprit was Xorg + FF9 using the top command,

This doesn't happen with Opera or other browsers and it doesn't occur using Firefox 8 under Fedora 14 on the same box. It's Firefox 9.0.1 on a new but fully updated Fedora 16 install. No addons.

So, Firefox 9.0.1 is not playing well with Xorg on my machine.

Any ideas on what could be causing this?

jazzer · #6 12th January 2012, 05:42 PM

Do you have an nvidia card and using the proprietary driver?

I have this exact same issue with the 290.10 driver release. I would use the nouveau driver but that leaves my screen with a garbled mess. You may be able to use the nouveau driver instead.

Here's a link on nvnews.net forum: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=168630

RupertPupkin · #7 12th January 2012, 06:03 PM

jazzer may be right about the nvidia driver. FWIW, I'm using an ATI card and not seeing any choppiness in Firefox 9.0.1 in F16. Do you have hardware acceleration in Firefox enabled? Go to Edit --> Preferences --> Advanced --> General, and see if "Use hardware acceleration when available" is checked in the Browsing section. I have it unchecked, but you could try changing that setting to see if it makes a difference.

gadgetwiz · #8 12th January 2012, 10:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RupertPupkin

jazzer may be right about the nvidia driver. FWIW, I'm using an ATI card and not seeing any choppiness in Firefox 9.0.1 in F16. Do you have hardware acceleration in Firefox enabled? Go to Edit --> Preferences --> Advanced --> General, and see if "Use hardware acceleration when available" is checked in the Browsing section. I have it unchecked, but you could try changing that setting to see if it makes a difference.

Thanks for the suggestion Rupert. I have already tried with acceleration both enabled and disabled. It didn't make any difference. Xorg tops out at 100% either way.

Looks like the only commonality we are finding is that jazzer and I both have nVidia cards but if the problem was with nVidia, seems lots more people would be complaining.

The good thing is, Opera works fine. The bad thing is, Opera is driving me crazy. Perhaps I'll try Chrome.

Not being able to use Firefox without this issue being resolved is probably going to be a show stopper for me with F16.

I still have F14 installed on another drive and this F16 install is just a test but I would like to get this issue resolved at some point. I'm starting to warm up a little to F16, even with Gnome3.

I'm certainly willing to try any other suggestions and thanks again for your help.

---------- Post added at 05:23 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:15 PM ----------

Quote:

Originally Posted by leigh123linux

Are you using gnome-shell if so try using a lighter DE as your card isn't up to the job.

Yes, I am using Gnome Shell and everything else works just fine. I can run desktop effects, OpenGL screen savers and even Cairo dock (accelerated). Everything is very fast too (with the exception of FF9), My video card is in a 4ghz system and I've never had any issues with performance using this card.

I've never been forced to use the nouveau drivers though.

I have KDE, LXDE and XFCE installed and I am experiencing the same issues with Firefox in all of those DE's.

leigh123linux · #9 12th January 2012, 10:01 PM

Are you using gnome-shell if so try using a lighter DE as your card isn't up to the job.

QuantumKnot · #10 13th January 2012, 02:00 AM

Is it choppy all the time or only at certain intervals (like every 5 secs)?

gadgetwiz · #11 13th January 2012, 05:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by QuantumKnot

Is it choppy all the time or only at certain intervals (like every 5 secs)?

It's choppy all the time. Basically, anytime I try to do anything in Firefox, be it scrolling, pageup or pagedown or anything else.

Matter of fact, I've just discovered that when Firefox is up and running, it causes lags everywhere in Fedora 16, no matter what I'm doing. When I shut down Firefox 9, everything returns to normal and is speedy again.

Here are screenshots that perfectly demonstrates the problem I'm having with Firefox 9.0.1..

Firefox 9 with a simple page down/scroll causes Xorg to jump to 94.6% (or higher).

Opera with a simple page dowm/scroll has little or no effect on xorg and my CPU usage.

Konqueror with a simple page up/down scroll has litttle or no effect on xorg and CPU usage.

Now, here is Firefox 9.0.1 just siting there doing nothing with me simply moving my mouse around the screen. As you can see, with FF9 just being up and running, moving the mouse around can cause xorg to jump to over 90% CPU usage.

Basically, just running Firefox 9.0.1 brings my system to it's knees and makes it practically unusable.

Any ideas folks?

QuantumKnot · #12 13th January 2012, 05:21 AM

I suspect it could be nouveau. I seem to remember encountering this problem before when I was running nouveau. I'm currently using the proprietary nvidia driver. When I scroll up and down in FF9.01 and watch top, I get FF using about 60% CPU, gnome-shell using 40%, and Xorg using 10% (I'm on a dual-core), but no noticeable lag.

Just as a test (and since doing through yum is not possible), download Firefox 8 from Mozilla's FTP site, unpack, and then run firefox (say from a terminal) and do the same things to see if it has this problem.

Depending on whether your F16 is 32 or 64 bit:

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/re...-8.0.1.tar.bz2 (32 bit)
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/re...-8.0.1.tar.bz2 (64 bit)

gadgetwiz · #13 13th January 2012, 07:08 AM

Ok, I downloaded 8.1 and as soon as I extracted it, I get the tracker-miner junk, which sucked up all of my CPU. Anything with "tracker" and "miner" in the title doesn't exactly give me the warm fuzzies, but that's another issue...

Anyway, I ran Firefox 8.0.1 and it immediately started to download the update to 9.0.1. I let that complete but didn't install the update.

Firefox 8.0.1 seemed slightlty less sluggish but I'm still having the same basic issue that I have with Firefox 9.0,1. Here is a screenshot using Firefox 8.0.1 while paging up and down (which it seemed I could do a little more quickly).

Perhaps what I'm seeing is just poor performance from the nouveau driver in Firefox.

Wonder why this poor performance/resource hogging only occurs in Firefox and not in Opera or Konqueror? These newer versions of Firefox are supposed to be faster than previous versions but they don't really feel like upgrades to me.

QuantumKnot · #14 13th January 2012, 09:45 AM

Sounds like it might be nouveau. Just another test.

Post the output when you type the following in a terminal: glxinfo | grep render

Also, try running glxgears. What's the FPS?

leigh123linux · #15 13th January 2012, 09:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by QuantumKnot

Sounds like it might be nouveau. Just another test.

Post the output when you type the following in a terminal: glxinfo | grep render

Also, try running glxgears. What's the FPS?

The output from glxgears is meaningless, gtkperf would be a better test.

Code:

su 
yum install gtkperf