rwa2's Journal: SwiftWeasel

I am liking Swiftweasel, it is noticeably faster than Iceweasel / Firefox on Linux, especially on netbooks like my eeepc 901 running eeebuntu.

Unfortunately, the deb repository for it is somewhat old (v3.0.3), and current .tgz builds from sourceforge are somewhat old as well (v3.0.5 for x86, and v3.0.6 for x86-64, whereas the current iceweasel / firefox is at v3.0.7). I kinda wish SticKK of the SwiftWeasel Project would post more instructions on how to build swiftweasel from current iceweasel sources.

Until then, I've seen that "about:buildconfig" can be used to identify the compiler and options used. When I get a chance, I'd like to try grabbing the iceweasel deb-src and modifying the build options to match. Don't see anything in there about how to enable Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) which is necessary to make *nix builds of firefox javascript run as fast as Windows builds, as mentioned at this firefox benchmarking site.

Oddly enough, I ran the SunSpider javascript benchmarking suite under both Swiftweasel and Iceweasel, and Swiftweasel actually took a tad longer. I feels much snappier in day-to-day use though, probably because of some of the FasterFox extension options. The default vanilla Iceweasel on the eeepc typically pauses for a second or two on new page loads.

Some help for building your own

[tqft]

Mozillazine 3rd party builds
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=42 [mozillazine.org]

You need a build environment, .mozconfig and the source code

Round one - simple build
https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Simple_build [mozilla.org]
If this works you are good to go to the next step

to do a profiled (pgo) build you need this in your .mozconfig
mk_add_options PROFILE_GEN_SCRIPT='$(PYTHON) $(MOZ_OBJDIR)/_profile/pgo/profileserver.py'

and this command instead of whatever else.
make -f client.mk profiledbuild

my .mozconfig
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