Looking for advice on understanding slowdowns while browsing

[dufeu]

First up - a disclaimer:

I'm not a programmer. Rather, I'm a reasonably computer savvy end user. I've played with installing Gentoo since pre 1.2 days and Gentoo runs my main workstations, servers and one of my laptops.

What I'm looking for is to become better educated on tracking down performance issues while web browsing. The primary browsers I use are mozilla-firefox, seamonkey and konqueror.

My primary observation is that I'll open a new web page and shortly thereafter, the browser window I have open will become unresponsive. Generally, if I wait long enough, it will respond. More rarely, the browser appears to stop responding altogether.

Part of the problem is that web pages are no longer "simple". Many web pages have 3rd party 'widgets' of one kind or another with said widgets residing on 3rd party server farms. It is apparent to me that many times, web site designers haven't any clue as to the impact on performance of these 3rd party widgets. This problem is compounded by the capabilities that social network sites enable for their users to blindly use 3rd party tools to 'enhance' or 'theme' a user's webpage. {blech!}

As I see it, most of the performance problems I'm seeing can be grouped in 3 different categories. Naturally, some of the performance problems could be made worse by synergistic recombination of 2 or even all three categories.

My feeling is that these main categories are:

java script related
flash playback/script related
network 3rd party server latency related

The problem is finding out which problem I'm seeing at any given time.

For example: google mail added a lot of javascript to make gmail more intelligent and to give it more capabilities. When the part of the page which deals with google chat would start to build, the browser would drop to it's knees and crawl. Google has resolved this, but it was extremely frustrating at the time.

Currently, I see a lot of blogger pages where I take serious performance hits. These include pages which make use of wordpress widgets {I hate snap!} and embedded videos. Don't even get me started on people who set 'automatic play=on' with the embedded songs and videos they use.

Many times I've had to kill firefox and then restart it. Once the firefox 'oops' screen appears, I then kill the tab which I suspect gave me a problem. This works in terms of being able to get back to web surfing ... so long as I then avoid the problem page. This is actually quite annoying.

What's most frustrating is not being able to pinpoint the actual cause of the problem. i.e. Is there a poorly coded java script/flash script running which effectively creates a 'race' condition while checking for input? Is there a problem getting a required 'something' from a 3rd party server {latency} which is not responding as expected? Do I have 'colliding' scripts? Is the version of java/flash I'm using incompatible with what the script designer expects? Is xulrunner throwing a fit at some extremely bad code?

If I can't specifically identify the problem, then I don't know who's cage to rattle. And yes, there are times when I really, really want to rattle someones cage.

I don't know where to start in terms of what tools may be available for tracking down this kind of information. I'm curious to see some suggestions and pointers on how to become more aware of what's going on 'behind the scenes' in a meaningful way. What I really want is some way to easily see when there is a latency issue or when a script may be going haywire. If it's a script issue, then what kind of script from where/who?

Comments anyone?
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[erik258]

First of all, I don't have the browsing issues you seem to. As a web developer and system administrator I spend a lot of time in front of a web browser, and, although I suspect I spend less time than average on laggy sites (being impatient and technically focused in subject matter helps this), I must say firefox performs pretty well for me.

Make sure to compile your own firefox if you can. firefox-bin seems slower than firefox to me. Turn on optimization and -march=native in your make.conf. I assume you have done this already. Perhaps there are other use flags to enhance performance as well.

If you tire of flash, as I did long ago, may I suggest you simply disable it? I don't surf with flash anymore. sometimes it's required, of course, and I just turn it back on in those cases. It's easy enough to Tools->Add-ons->Enable flash on a site-by-site basis.

The same is true of embedded media like movies and music. Less common than flash now, I suspect embedded media to largely replace flash applications once html5 is widely implemented. You could disable those plugins too.

Finally, I mention Midori. Not necessarily a completely stable or bug free browser, Midori has something to offer nevertheless. It's faster than firefox & friends (all the Gecko-based browsers are essentially the same IMHO) because it's based instead on the Webkit rendering engine, just like Safari and Chrome. Webkit is faster than Gecko and also, unlike Firefox & friends, gets 100/100 on the Acid 3 test (gecko comes close, with 92/100; incedentally, the Droid browser on my phone manages to edge it out at 93/100 and is almost as fast too. I assume it's using webkit just like Chrome).

Midori isn't 100% yet (try providing bad credentials to an HTTP Auth website and you'll see dozens of login boxes spawn for example) but it does have an ebuild, supports netscape plugins, and implements tabbed browsing. Overall I use it almost as much as firefox.
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