Swiftfox for Duo Core 2

[Dotan Cohen]

On 22/01/07, Daniel Pittman <daniel at rimspace.net> wrote:
> "Dotan Cohen" <dotancohen at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Swiftfox (firefox builds optimized for a paricular processor) are
> > available for these processors:
> >
> >    *  Pentium 4
> >    * Pentium M
> >    * Pentium 3
> >    * Pentium 3M
> >    * Pentium 2
> >    * Prescott
> >    * Celeron (Willamette, Northwood, Celeron D)
> >    * Celeron M
> >    * Celeron (Coppermine, Tualatin)
> >
> > Which one should I choose if I've got an Intell Duo Core 2 proccessor?
>
> Short answer: None of them.  You should use the stock, unmodified
> version that is packaged as part of Ubuntu.

Iceweaslel? I hate the icon :)

> The longer answer is: what do you think you will gain from this?

A slightly more responsive firefox. On my last machine, a 1.3 gHz
Duron, the difference between swiftfox and firefox was amazing. Simply
amazing. I didn't benchmark it with anything other than the seat of my
pants. And even the wife, who didn't know that I had changed anything,
commented on how much faster firefox had become.

> From the very, very few benchmarks available comparing Swiftfox to
> Firefox it shows a small but notable improvement on an essentially
> synthetic benchmark.

For me it made a world of difference.

> It also shows a performance advantage of around one or two percent in
> the real world -- probably mostly due to the omission of support for
> layout outside Latin1.

I use Hebrew mostly. It supports Hebrew just fine.

> Is your web browser *really* a performance critical part of your day to
> day experience?  Does it honestly consume enough CPU time to be worth
> the bother of optimizing?

Yes

> Are you sure you wouldn't gain more performance by sticking with the
> stock Firefox and putting a little effort into optimizing Pango
> rendering -- the most likely gain in the synthetic benchmark?

I might. Tell me more. I'm very, very interested.

> Heck, are you sure you wouldn't gain more by doing some real profiling
> on Firefox and working out where it spends time working?

Like?

> Finally, you /are/ aware that this will not change the performance of
> the real high load applications through the web browser -- flash, video
> and PDF rendering are not going to be effected by this...

Flash and video I don't use. I'm often reading PDF's but I download
them and read them in a standalone viewer.

Dotan Cohen

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