Firefox 3 problems in Linux?

[shahgols]

I don't really have the technical knowledge to understand what's wrong and if it's fixed or not.  I'm looking forward to FF3 and this makes me really nervous. 

http://jasondclinton.livejournal.com/66509.html

[tomh38]

Yeah ... this doesn't look good for Firefox on Linux.  Nevertheless, I'm hoping that some time between the release of Firefox 3.0 and the release of the VL package, there will be a patch or other fix available for this.  For those of us using VL it may mean waiting longer for Firefox 3 than Windows users will, but I'm willing to wait.  I'm also pretty satisfied with Firefox 2.x.x.xx, so I'm in no hurry for Firefox 3.0, even though it looks like it will have significant improvements over Firefox 2.

Heck, I bet Epic Fail Guy (formerly Hanumizzle), The Headacher, M0E-lnx, or one of those guys could fix this.

Yeah, I'm sucking up.  So what?   

[Triarius Fidelis]

Well it looks like FF 3 uses fsync (file system synchronize) a lot. But, apparently, only in connection with sqlite. Can you compile FF 3 without sqlite?

[exeterdad]

After reading the very long discussion on the bug thread, I take it that compiling without sqlite is a no go.  It would appear everything is stored in a database as opposed to FF2 and earlier storing everything in flat files. It seems bookmarks and everything are handled this way.  Slightly depressing  as it might make transferring of FF profiles to a new Linux install a bit more difficult.
Also...  we are no longer compiling our own builds of Mozilla products.  We can't distribute (our builds) and call them by their trademarked names, nor can we use the familiar icons. Looks as though we have to wait until Mozilla devs iron this out.

After reading this from the discussion:

Jeffrey Baker   2008-05-13 13:58:50 PDT

Ubuntu users are not the must technically minded Linux users, so you will often
see them attributing this to the wrong cause.  I think the most frequent form
of complaint is that "ubuntu spends too much time in iowait" which is merely a
manifestation of the fact that Firefox is, indeed, waiting for i/o.

... I nearly spit my coffee all over my keyboard.  I can't believe he worded like that in a very public Mozilla bug discussion!

[Freston]

I've been running FF3b5 without complaint for one and a halve week now. No problems. In fact I really love it.

[bigpaws]

So firefox 3 is going to use sqlite for its backend db.

Here we go again. Take the software and make it start
to use hardware regardless of the user. There will be alot
of I/O consuming more of a low end machine. How will a
MS machine ever run with all the background services, spyware
and now this. None of these things really do SMP, so the ones with
Dual Core and Quad Core will see no improvement in the speed.

Bigpaws

[shahgols]

I guess I'm sticking with FF2 for a long time to come.   Time to download the Linux/Windows versions now and burn them to CDs. 

[BlueMage]

So firefox 3 is going to use sqlite for its backend db.

Here we go again. Take the software and make it start
to use hardware regardless of the user. There will be alot
of I/O consuming more of a low end machine. How will a
MS machine ever run with all the background services, spyware
and now this. None of these things really do SMP, so the ones with
Dual Core and Quad Core will see no improvement in the speed.

Bigpaws

Except FF3b5 (and now RC1) do seem to run faster on my Vista machine.  And I don't suffer the slowdown attributed either.  That could be that for power-saving reasons I turn my machine off whenever I'm not using it...