462660 - Firefox zoom speed depends on number of fonts installed

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[Tomasz Sałaciński]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; pl-PL; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008101315 Ubuntu/8.10 (intrepid) Firefox/3.0.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; pl-PL; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008101315 Ubuntu/8.10 (intrepid) Firefox/3.0.3

I've noticed that Firefox zoom highly speed depends on number of installed fonts (see bug 410365). I am using Linux, and like on most Linux distributions, Firefox is working very slow.

I've noticed that it worked fine on Gentoo. Most Linux distributions come with a great number of fonts to support every language possible - when I've removed these, Firefox started to work normally. This is confirmed by few people (and by me). The reason why Firefox on Windows works fast is simple - Windows users have little number of fonts installed by default.

Firefox speed should not depend on number of fonts installed, there should be some kind of cache that caches the fonts while Firefox is running.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Just run Firefox on default Linux setup and see that it's working bad
Actual Results:  
Firefox works slow.

Expected Results:  
Firefox should work fast, like on Windows.

Removing the unneeded fonts helps a lot, this fixes the problem for me and few other people, but it's not a solution. Linux distributors will want to support every language possible, and Firefox users using non-latin languages are forced either to browse only websites in their own language or use slow Firefox (on Core2Duo 2.53ghz resizing Wikipedia by clicking once on zoom button takes 2 seconds! Resizing page to the desired size takes 15-20 seconds - that's not working properly, especially when on Windows it takes 1-2 seconds - it's 10 times slower).

I'm giving that Major because text zoom is Firefox' major feature, this bug exists on every OS and it just annoys and kills the comfort of surfing.

Comment 1

[Bakyt Niyazov]

confirm

Comment 2

[Francesco Cosoleto]

I confirm and it's high priority for me too. Please, consider distributions
such as openSUSE 11 can install 4000 fonts in /usr/share/fonts, that makes zoom
function requiring a few of seconds almost always on common web sites, unlike
in typical Windows enviroment.

Comment 4

[Samuli Kärkkäinen]

Confirm.

Comment 5

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

--> Core::GFX:Thebes, carrying over blocking nomination

Comment 6

[Alexander Frolushkin]

I can confirm this on 64 bit Ubuntu 8.10, both repository and official builds.

Comment 7

[Francesco Cosoleto]

Looks as fixed in recent Firefox 3.1/3.2 builds:

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/2008/11/2008-11-08-02-tracemonkey/
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/

Comment 8

[Francesco Cosoleto]

Fixed in Firefox 3.5 release for me. Anyone can confirm and then close this bug?

Comment 9

[Tomasz Sałaciński]

Yes, right now it works perfectly!

Comment 10

[Tomasz Sałaciński]

Sorry, forgot to close the bug.