Discussions suggest that a lot of Firefox 's sluggishness on Linux (as compared to Windows) is due to Intel compiler profiling (maybe, but GCC offers profiling ), compiler cpu optimizations ( i386 vs. i686 -- not so much anymore; Mandriva compiles Firefox for i586 - see BONUS at the end) and Linux's use of pango , a library for laying out and rendering text with an emphasis on internationalization (likely a cause of slowness). Let's get rid of Pango support first. This is easily done by editing your .bashrc file and adding at the end export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1 Resource your .bashrc with $ source .bashrc You could also put the line of export code in .bash_profile. Then just re-start Firefox to get the benefit. Short of recompiling Firefox ( which appears to be a daunting task ), we have found something that helps if you have RAM available. The trick is to keep the disk cache in /dev/shm , a POSIX-compliant temporary filesystem ( tmpfs ). Let's us
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