Skip to main content

Installing FIrefox 3.5 on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

Firefox is slow in Linux compared to XP or even Vista on the same hardware. Do a quick google search for "firefox slow linux" and you see it's not just me who's saying this.

I tried a couple of tips from other users in discussion forums such as disabling visual effects and IPv6 but it didn't really help. That's why I started thinking about installing Firefox 3.5 on my Ubuntu 9.04 64-bits machine to see if it makes a difference.

At first I though I will have to download it directly from the Firefox website, however to my surprise I found the package in Synaptic. I am not sure which repository it came from but I can see the package "firefox-3.5" from the Synaptic package manager.

I went through the usual installation process and frankly it did not prompt me to remove existing firefox-3.0 packages. Instead, it installs the Firefox 3.5 alone side Firefox 3.0 under the name Shiretoko Web Browser in the Application -> Internet -> Shiretoko Web Browser.

Could be just my wishful thinking but Firefox 3.5 does seems to be a bit faster than 3.0.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Load Testing ASP.NET Sites with JMeter

Following my previous post about using JMeter to test MOSS, I tried to figure out what are the bare minimum requirements of using JMeter against a plain ASP.NET website. I wrote a very simple ASP.NET web application with just a button, a text fields and a static label. This application displays the content of a text file in the static label when it loads and write content of the text field back to the file when the button is clicked. I found all I need to do in order to script this using JMeter is to extract __VIEWSTATE and __EVENTVALIDATION fields then send them back in the update request. My JMeter test plain looks like this:

Getting HP Mini 1000 Wireless to Work Under Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala‎ Netbook Remix

I installed Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix in my (actually my wife's) HP mini 1000 this afternoon. To my surprise the wireless card did not work. Also, when I looked at System -> Administration -> Hardware Drivers, the list was blank. After few hours of googling and reading through several not too helpful forum posts, I learned that this was caused by Ubuntu 9.10 shipping "b43" driver out of box, which does not work for HP mini 1000. The proprietary driver "wl" should be used instead. However, no one said exactly what I needed to do to fix this problem. Eventually, I decided to just launch Synaptic and search for "broadcom". The first result in the filtered list was bcmwl-kernel-source, which looked promising so I just went ahead and installed it. I had a look at the /etc/modprobe.d folder after the installation finished, I noticed that the package actually created a blacklist file for "b43" related modules for me already. After reb

Load Testing SharePoint (MOSS) Sites with JMeter

I have used JMeter for load testing few non-ASP.NET web sites before, however I could not get it to work with ASP.NET web sites. This is mainly due to ASP.NET ViewState and event validations, which stops a recorded JMeter script from being played back. Recently I worked on a MOSS project and we were looking for tools to perform load testing on the server. Many people said the load testing tool in Microsoft Team System for Testers works well with MOSS. However, it is quite expensive so I decided to give JMeter another go. After several hours of hacking, I actually got it to work and here’s how I did it. My test page is the pretty standard MOSS edit document property screen with few extra text fields added and the goal here is to use a JMeter script to change the document properties. Once I have a working script, I can configure JMeter to fire hundreds of instances of this script simultaneously to simulate the user workload. As shown in the screenshot below, the test plan contai