Notices

Hi,

I was thinking about MicroB speed, compared with a desktop PC, even vs an iPhone/iTouch, the Maemo 2008 browser is very slow. When I introduce an URL and click on the "go" button, it take a lot of time to "process" the request, then it load the page without any major issue, but at the first moment the browser is slow, this means that when I do click on an link I must wait between 12 to 18 secs for get any response from the browser.

There is a way to speed up the Browser responsiveness and fix this behavior?

Regards,

Taguapire.

You can edit your /home/user/.mozilla/microb/prefs.js in terminal or via ssh ( when microb is not running ) and drop in some or all of these changes. You can also use the about:config page. It's slow, but will get the job done eventually.

# Too many connections and you will swap this poor CPU, this will allow it to be much more responsive.
user_pref("network.http.max-connections", 2);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections-per-server", 1);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server", 1);
user_pref("network.http.pipelining.maxrequests", 10000);

# Increase the cache size
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.capacity", 16384);

# Improve readability and clickability of most sites
user_pref("font.minimum-size.x-central-euro", 18);
user_pref("font.minimum-size.x-cyrillic", 18);
user_pref("font.minimum-size.x-unicode", 18);
user_pref("font.minimum-size.x-user-def", 18);
user_pref("font.minimum-size.x-western", 18);

# dunno how much help this is
user_pref("browser.sessionhistory.max_entries", 2);

# Impersonate the iphone. Works better than you might think most of the time.
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/5.0 (N8x0 like iPhone; U; Linux like Mac OS X; ARM; en) AppleWebkit/420+ (Gecko, like KHTML)");


I also recommend turning on swap space if you have not done so already. Control Panel -> memory -> virtual -> Extend virtual memory: Yes size 64MB


It's not perfect, but it's an improvement. I'm still tracking a few areas where I think we can improve the speed.

12 to 18 seconds seems like a lot longer than it usually is for me. It usually takes only a second or two for me, unless I have other windows open that happen to have flash or something running. Otherwise, it might be slow for me if some process from another program has gone crazy and is taking up a lot of CPU time, which is when I go to the terminal and use "top" to check out the situation.

I'd recommend you install the flashblock add-on to microb to prevent unwanted flash ads or whatever from slowing down the browser (it lets you enable the flash objects you want to see by tapping them). You can get that here:
http://browser-extras.garage.maemo.o...ds_os2008.html

If you have other plug-ins installed, like adblock plus, try disabling them and restarting the browser. It just might be slowing it down a bit.

brontide: Thanks for the list of pref changes, I have seen a lot of suggestions for these but yours looks pretty comprehensive. I'll try them out.

Untick the flash plugin option to make it work similar to an iPhone/iTouch - it'll run a helluva lot faster

once i deleted greasemonkey and adblock plus and added the flashblock addon my connection speed went way up... i did update a hosts file which gets rid of a lot of crap that slows down the browser - it is acceptable speed on a wifi connection better than my old treos (600 and then 700p)

It's also noteworthy that the browser is currently powered by a rather old pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9 engine, which is also going to power Firefox 3. As Firefox 3 and thus Gecko 1.9 are moving ever-closer to release, Mozilla has made considerable speed and memory usage improvements to the engine in recent months. There have also been some improvements in the cairo graphics library which Gecko heavily relies on for rendering.

The next ITOS update is likely to feature a newer, closer-to-release Gecko build, and perhaps a cairo update as well, and should thus improve browsing performance considerably.

I tried those settings and they are working great for me. I especially like the iphone version of google reader.

I noticed that deactivating adblock plus gives back hell of speed back to the browser oO
Although it has to load more images it is faster and the startup does take only 1/10 the time than with ad block plus :/
So do I have to live with commercy? xD

look at http://wiki.maemo.org/Ad_blocking , hosts and css method

It is almost criminal that Nokia/Maemo haven't updated the main component of the Internet Tablet - the MicroB browser. AFAICT there's been some minor updates to MicroB, but the actual engine still harks back to the pre-alpha fork Nokia made back in mid-2007!

Sure, there are now more up-to-date alternatives being readied, but if Nokia wanted to keep users happy they'd make an exception to the "maintenance mode" order and deliver a recent build through official channels so it'd make life easier also for the non-geeks among NIT users.

The browser add-on team seems to have likewise retired since early 2008 and if they rebuilt the add-ons plus added NoScript to the selection Nokia/Maemo would certainly recover some goodwill factor.

How about it, Gil Q et al?