Bugzilla – Bug 104041
Slow web experience compared to Windows XP and web browsers on that platform
Last modified: 2005-08-31 17:54:27 UTC
This is an issue which a regular home or office user / rookie administrator will be hard pressed to understand without a lot of prior knowledge, and Novell SuSE Linux or openSuSE Linux would do their users a great service if they adopt this perspective at every turn. Mostly, you do very well ;-) * Resolving DNS - the IPv6 problem IPv6 is turned on by default in SuSE Linux 9.3 Pro. There is an IPv6 module loaded at startup, and the setting network.dns.disableIPv6 is set to false in Firefox if you take a look at about:config. * The slow web experience There are a number of settings under about:config, namely the network.http.* settings that can be altered to give a better web experience, e.g. setting the network.http.pipelining to true. SuSE Linux Pro 9.3 defaults to using GPLFlash. However, GPLFlash only supports version 4 of Macromedia Flash, and many pages crash or are slow to visit. Downloading and installing version 7 fixes most crashes. The biggest problem is of course the way Firefox/Konqueror resolves DNS. Try this page - www.vg.no. It is the biggest, most visited newspaper in Norway. Given a broadband connection of 2Mbit/s using Firefox - without the above tweeks on Windows XP - is a lot faster than Firefox on SuSE Linux 9.3. The page must be resolved in steps, as it contains ads from other servers and both Firefox and Konqueror on SuSE Linux 9.3 Pro are slow, very slow. Trying to convince my wife that GNU/Linux is much better than Windows just doesn't happen this way. I don't know how to convince you that a faster web experience is paramount to success, but please - the people who need IPv6 probably know enough to turn it on, leave the majority of users alone at the moment.
Why is this critical?
Good question. I'll try to give you a good answer: 1. Information and services are available through the World Wide Web or through Intranets and Extranets based on the same technology. Millions of users do their banking, tax returns, order doctor's appointments, plane tickets, books and what not. Their web browsers have become their primary working tool, alongside email/chat and Office-documents. It is critical to all of them that pages render as fast as possible, but as described there are a number of settings that slows down their experience. Most of these people will not know how to fix it, so it would be nice of Novell to do it for them. The ones who know about IPv6 will probably be able to turn on this feature. 2. Most computer users have a Microsoft operating system on their harddrive. I'm assuming from what I've read so far that Novell wants some of these users to try GNU/Linux, as there is money spent on development, advertising, documentation and Novell needs to sell boxed sets and services for their operating system. It would be very unfortunate if users coming to try GNU/Linux finds it very slow at doing their daily tasks - see point 1 again. Most of them don't want to find out that there is a setting for making things faster, most would ask - why wasn't this a default setting? A good web experience on the desktop is critical to Novell, because millions of users will stick with what they already have - Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer. 3. Free (as in freedom) advocasy. I've used SuSE Linux since 1998 and for the last three years as my desktop OS, and advocate GNU/Linux and free (as in freedom) software when it can solve a problem or prevent one later on. I've paid for three or four boxed sets before I got a broadband connection, because I thought it would pay of in the end. Now that Novell has launced openSuSE I would really like to thank you all for a job well done by giving something back - some critical tips aquired trying to convince family, friends and work mates that your offer is the way to go. Given this perspective of a better user experience / advocasy I hope you agree with me that this issue is critical.
reassigned to firefox
I would like to point out that the IPv6 issue is not confined to Firefox, but Konqueror and other browers as well.
It might help you to know that this behaviour is experienced on two laptops. Both operating systems have been used on these two laptops, no change in hardware, so it is a software issue.
We need bugreport for specific issues please. IPv6 networking is not mozilla/firefox specific. Please refine this bug (and open another one if needed) for a special component.
What can I say that haven't been said? It is a good idea to turn off IPv6 in your distributed browers until most sites on the Internet, in Intranets and Extranets have an IPv6 address that the browser can resolve. The experience is particulary rotten on sites using external ad agencies, which means multiple missing IPv6 addresses slowing resolving to a crawl on a Pentium III 600MHz with 256 Mb of RAM. The hardware is OK - just use better default settings in the software. I don't know how to debug this or refine this bug - that is why I file a bug report to knowledgable people. If you can give a methodology to document what I've described, creating a log of how the browers spend their time, I'll do it, but I don't know how - I'm a desktop user using KDE 3.4.2 as my desktop environment on SuSE 9.3. Just ask specific questions. :-)
adding kde-maintainers@suse.de for Konqueror
AJ, do we want to disable IPv6 by default in Firefox?
we did for a while in konqueror and it's pretty mood. Without a IPv6 route and nameserver, your DNS requests will return _very_ quickly. So: if IPv6 DNS is a problem for you, then your network is majorly broken. I'd like to see a tcpdump if you visit the norwegian newspaper site. Because for me it resolves the name _very_ quickly and then it takes some time to get all the required data - this has nothing to do with IPv6 though
How do I do that?
Let's leave IPv6 for now enabled -
As IPv6 name resolution shouldn't be a problem in well configured networks, we close this for now. Sorry.