wine

Firefox on Wine on Ubuntu faster than Firefox on Ubuntu

Submitted by Emil on Sat, 03/07/2009 - 11:26

Last update: 2009-03-07 22:38

After reading this entry: Browser benchmarks 2: even Wine beats Linux Firefox, I decided to test it for myself. These were my results:

  • Google's V8 Benchmark Suite gives Firefox on Ubuntu 98.3 points, while Firefox on Wine gets 114 points.
  • Adobe Flash in Firefox on Wine seems to work well except from displaying full screen video, when it just hangs.
  • Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab doesn't work, use Ctrl+PgDn and Ctrl+PgUp instead.
  • Ubiquity, the command line interface for Firefox works, but looks like crap.
  • Scrolling on pages with fixed backgrounds (like Twitter) was slow. I created a user script for greasemonkey to deal with it by making the background scrolling.

All in all, Firefox on Wine on Ubuntu feels more snappy than Firefox on Ubuntu. I'm going to stick with it for a while and post any glitches I find here.

These tests were done with Firefox 3.0.7 on Wine 1.0.1 on Ubuntu 8.10 and Firefox 3.0.7 on Ubuntu 8.10, respectively.

I tried the latest Wine from here, but found that version 1.0.1 from the Ubuntu repositories worked better for me.