====== Accelerating Firefox's rendering time ====== If you use <color purple>Firefox</color> as your daily browser, and you're not using <color purple>Indic</color> or any <color purple>CJK</color> script as your Firefox locale, you can disable the <color purple>Pango</color> renderer, which makes Firefox support these languages, but also make it (much) slower. Before disabling Pango, i've loaded a big HTML page (the PHP reference) in Firefox, and watched the CPU time used by Firefox when the page was fully loaded. Of course the HTML page was stored on my hard drive to avoid network issues.\\ With Pango enabled (the default), it took __1 minute and 12 seconds__ to load the page. Now, let's disable Pango. Use your favorite editor to open the file name given by typing : <code console> $ which firefox </code> As you see, the Firefox executable is in fact a shell script that sets up the environment before actually launching Firefox. Look for the line that contains <color navy>MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO</color>. You'll see those two lines: <file> # MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1 # export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO </file> Simply uncomment these two lines: <file> MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1 export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO </file> And you're done !\\ My big HTML page, after having disabled the Pango renderer, took only __40 seconds__ to load. Note that you won't lose any Firefox functionality, the Pango renderer just permits to support some exotic languages. ~~META:date created = 2006-09-09 18:15~~