CPU Optimised Firefox

sechs · Oct 20, 2005

I know that many of the folks here are Firefox users. How many of you use CPU-optimised builds?

I'm curious as to the experiences that people here are having with them.

Buck · Oct 20, 2005

I had a PIII optimized build and really didn't notice much of a difference. Maybe it's better with newer builds and CPUs.

Bozo · Oct 20, 2005

Where do you get builds that are CPU optimized?

Bozo :mrgrn:

Buck · Oct 20, 2005

Moox: http://www.moox.ws/tech/mozilla/

JKKJ · Oct 20, 2005

I use the moox m2 build for Athlon XPs, but to be honest the only difference I notice is the speed of the menus.

sechs · Oct 20, 2005

Here's a good source:
http://www.pryan.org/mozilla/firefox/

I downloaded a couple of different builds. Right now, I'm testing mmoy's.

I noticed that it was very fast opening twenty or so tabs simultaneously at start, but am hard-pressed to find differences in rendering individual pages at a time.

blakerwry · Oct 21, 2005

i didn't notice much of a speed difference, but did seem to have glitches using the mmx optimized moox builds on pII/pIII hardware. Just random crashing.

LiamC · Oct 21, 2005

Hmm, my Retro gaming box is a P!!! Coppermine/Slotket/BH6 combo running Win98 and all of MOOX's M2 builds since 1.0 through 1.06 and I've never had an issue (that I recall)

Gilbo · Oct 21, 2005

As a gentoo user, I have a lot of experience with custom compiled software. My opinion is that for the vast majority of applications --and this should be held to be even more true for desktop applications-- compile optimizations have no noticeable affect on the user's experience. The only exception to this is prelinking, which does make a noticeable difference on loading times when an application is dynamically linked to a lot of libraries.

There are scientific programs, and other highly CPU-sensitive-in-one-way-or-another programs (eg maybe with -Os (compiled for size not performance) it will fit entirely in the cache), for which it can make a real difference, but generally it's not noticeable.

The one application that I've personally noticed it on is MPD which I use to play music on random old boxes that I scatter through my home. It's a geek's way of creating an integrated, house-wide, home audio system. With proper compile time optimizations MPD will run on really old stuff.

sechs · Oct 22, 2005

All of the optimised Firefox builds that I've seen have some sort of patching, i.e. changing the code to make it work better on the target chips. That's at least a little more than just compile optimization.

The problem that I'm seeing with browsers is that the latency of the Internet often more than outweighs any optimization that the application may have.