I finally tried my ISP's DNS servers and that seemed to take hold, though I don't know why. It shouldn't make a difference but I've been surfing from my Lucid Lynx VM for two days now without a hitch. That leads me to my second problem.
I'm a big fan of Firefox so naturally, use it on all my Linux and Windows machines. I've tried Google's Chrome web browser on a Windows VM and like it, so I decided to install Chromium on the Lucid VM. Seemed to go great guns at first but then hit major snags.
Actually, I was having problems in both Firefox and Chromium which all seemed to be tied to my general networking problems for the VM. For the past two days, I've been surfing the web just fine with Firefox, though. Time to try Chromium.
For a minute or two, it seemed great. I thought I could give Chromium a real workout and see if it really was faster than Firefox, just as the speed tests between Firefox and Chrome suggest when run on Windows. I've got some bad news.
Firefox continued to let me surf the web at lightning speed, but after a few minutes, Chromium slowed down to a wounded crawl. I tried Googling the problem but only came up with a slow video playback problem in Chromium on Ubuntu reported at ubuntuforums.org.
Admittedly, before I had the chance to investigate further, I had to leave for work, so I won't be able to make more tests until I get home tonight. I suspect the issue may still be tied to Ubuntu Lynx running as a VM and the associated networking problems, but I can't be sure. Until I get home and have a chance to look at this more completely, has anyone else had an experience with poor Chromium web browser performance in Ubuntu 10.04?
Just an update. Opened up both Firefox and Chromium on my Lynx VM. Can surf using both. Chromium seems a tad slower, but that's hardly a scientific measurement. I'll keep you posted. If anyone else has something relevant (and polite) to add, please feel free.
ReplyDeleteIts is slower than Firefox. By quite a bit here running Debian sid.
ReplyDeleteMozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.4) Gecko/20100523 Firefox/3.6.4
Google Chrome 6.0.408.1-r47574, same goes for the "stable" version.
I have the opposite problem. Chrome is super fast on my Ubuntu 10 system and Firefox is super slow..I wish it was the other way around for work
ReplyDeleteIDK but on my EEEPC 900 Firefox greys out (unresponsive) frequently and chromium very rarely does. Why are you even talking about this if you are running in VM ware??? get a pc with a native install and then we'll talk.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading your blog I thought I would give Chrome for Linux a test drive. I also use Linux (Ubuntu 10.04 x86_64) in a virtual environment the difference being I use VirtualBox 3.2 with: 1GB RAM and one Proc.
ReplyDeleteI used SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark to test both browsers; the following are my results:
Firefox 3.6.3 - 4386.2ms
Chrome 5.0.375.55 - 745.2ms
From my test Chrome beats Firefox hands down.
This is so pointless.
ReplyDeleteI guess this isn't just an isolated issue. Thanks for the responses, everyone.
ReplyDeleteI totally disagree with this post, why are you rating about this when you are running it in a VM and you clearly had network problems.
ReplyDeleteAlex, you don't have to agree with this post...you also don't have to post a comment here.
ReplyDeleteJust to let everyone know, the comments here are moderated. If you can't make a statement in a reasonably civil manner, I won't approve the comment. If you don't like it here, move on. I'm not dragging you in off the streets to read my blog.
ReplyDeleteChromium is still in development. It's a bleeding edge product. Expecting it to be better than something that's already stable/released isn't realistic. However, based on my tests there may be something different about your VM/computer/network. I currently run chromium on about 5 separate installs and in each case it is faster then firefox. The only complaints I have are that there was a time when the daily build broke gmail compatibility and that the entire browser freezes when loading certain tabs (this really depends on the build, it's usually fixed the next day).
ReplyDeleteCould it be an ipv6 problem? I have to disable 1pv6 completely in my OSes or there's a major lag--has to do with my ISP not yet supporting ipv6, I believe.
ReplyDeleteYou can configure Firefox alone to disable ipv6, which won't affect Chromium. By chance, is this what you've done?
Hi, I found you post today because I have the very same problem! VmWare 7.0.1, Ubuntu 10.04 and Chrome. Networking was ok, but now it is unusably slow. Chrome hangs at the message "resolving host" and even other network operations are really very slow.The bad news: I have no solution for this. Maybe some recent Ubuntu update did this behaviour?
ReplyDeleteIf firefox is slow on a computer equipped with a SSD disk the following should help:
ReplyDeletetype "about:config" (without the " signs, of course) into the address bar, and acknowledge that you will be careful
- Press the right mouse key and create a new integer named "toolkit.storage.synchronous"
- and then set this integer to "0"
This should do the trick: Normally firefox saves the whole database containing the search history and all saved links every time something inside this database changes - and halts the system until the last byte of it has been written. If this key exists and is set to 0 it will still save the history - but won't wait until the SSD has finished writing to it. Reducing the number in browser.history_expire_sites to keep this database small will also help.
I preferred firefox, mainly because add-ons. For me chromium always was much faster than firefox on ubuntu, so when they made quite descend extensions, I switched. Although epiphany is even faster for me, it doesn't have enough support for some web formats as well as no good extensions.
ReplyDeleteChromium clearly is not ready for my Linux box. It's just not mature enough. With time and development though, it will be a contender for sure.
ReplyDeleteThis is a specific problem related to Chrome and Firefox running on VMware Workstation 7. We should find out why this kind of problem happens.
ReplyDeleteIm running VMware Fusion Version 3.1.1 on OSX 10.6.4. Will come up with the results asap.
I actually found that chromium works on my ubuntu 10.04 where firefox continually caused mouse freezes at times, and I had to press control q to close firefox to free the mouse. So far Chromium works without this problem. I have a NP compaq NC8000 laptop, so it's an old laptop, but Chromium seems to work. I'll post back if it starts having problems.
ReplyDeleteI deleted the virtual machine and recently did a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.04 on a production machine. I typically use Firefox for my web browsing, but late last week, after a power outage at my home, I noticed a number of my Google Gadgets weren't displaying in Firefox.
ReplyDeleteJust for giggles, I installed Chromium and logged into my iGoogle account and everything appeared fine. Firefox has since recovered, but not I have to decide which browser I want to use on Ubuntu.
Switched to chromium a few days ago and yeah its not as fast or stable as Firefox but I'm still using it as my default since it looks way better.
ReplyDelete