Revisiting Linux Part 1: A Look at Ubuntu 8.04
by Ryan Smith on August 26, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Linux
Applications: Web Browsing
Windows Default: Internet Explorer 7
What I use: Firefox 3
Ubuntu Default: Firefox 3
Much to the chagrin of Microsoft, the web browser is turning in to a miniature OS of its own, and in the case of anything that’s not Internet Explorer, it’s a miniature OS that has no allegiance to a real operating system. It’s the primary way to retrieve most information from the internet, applications can be created through AJAX and Flash, video can be watched (see: Hulu). A good cross-platform web browser removes a great deal of the need to use any specific OS, and this is something that works in Ubuntu’s favor.
Ubuntu ships with Firefox 3, Internet Explorer’s loyal opposition and currently the #2 browser on the market. So long as a site isn’t built for IE6 Firefox has great compatibility, good speed, and an army of extensions to add features to it. Since many of you already use it, there’s not a lot to say here: it’s a very solid browser, and something I find to be superior to Internet Explorer.
As I already use Firefox under Windows, the transition here was virtually non-existent. Ubuntu doesn’t have any direct Windows to Ubuntu transition tools, but after moving my Firefox profile from Windows to Ubuntu and reconfiguring a few location-sensitive settings, I was up and going. Internet Explorer users are going to have more of a transition obviously, but it’s not much. All of the major browsers’ core behaviors are the same, which makes it easy to switch among them with little fuss.
At the risk of marginalizing the rest of Ubuntu, I consider Firefox to be one of the core components that makes Ubuntu a success story. Because so much computer use these days is inside a browser, it has become a lynchpin for a good OS. If your browser is bad, then it’s probably hurting the usability of your OS if it means that many users cannot do something they regularly do on another browser. One only needs to look at the early versions of Mac OS X to get a good picture of this, as it shipped with the only-bearable Internet Explorer 5.
There are however a few caveats that I’d like to hit on. Something that continues to throw me for a loop is that while it’s the same Firefox I use under Windows and Mac OS X, it doesn’t necessarily look the same. The rendering engine is the same, but OS differences start to play out here. Mac OS X, Windows, and Ubuntu all render text slightly differently, and in the case of Ubuntu come with a significantly different font set. Because Firefox is at the mercy of the OS for fonts, what you get are small but noticeable differences in how the same page looks.
Firefox with default fonts
Firefox with MS Core fonts
Firefox under Windows
Above we have AnandTech rendered in Firefox 3 on Windows, and Ubuntu. On Windows Firefox uses Times New Roman and Arial for its default fonts, but these fonts do not exist on Ubuntu; rather Ubuntu uses what’s called “serif” and “sans-serif”. This along with how the two OSs differ in font anti-aliasing results in the different look of Firefox under Ubuntu. Having used Windows for a number of years, I have never gotten past the idea of Ubuntu looking “wrong” even though the right look is entirely subjective.
Ultimately I ended up adding the missing fonts by installing the msttcorefonts package, which contains Times New Roman, Arial, and the other “big name” standard fonts. With those installed and Firefox configured to use them, text looks much closer, although not quite the same. It’s a shame that Ubuntu can’t include these fonts by default.
The second caveat is one of performance. When using Javascript-heavy sites in particular, Firefox on Ubuntu seems just a bit slower than under Windows. I had never been able to figure out why until I saw this Slashdot article. Firefox for Linux is not compiled with profile guided optimization, a method of improving the performance of binaries by looking at how they’re used. While Ubuntu compiles their own releases of Firefox, they do the same thing. As a result, there’s a speed difference in Firefox – it’s the same code, but the Windows version is compiled in such a way that it’s faster. As I wrote at the start of this article, I’m not concerned with the performance of Ubuntu or its applications for the most part, and this falls under that notion. Firefox is slower, but not to the point that I care. It’s interesting enough that it bears mentioning, however.
Just to give you an idea of what the speed difference is, here’s a breakout of one of our Firefox benchmarks from the benchmarking section later in this article:
As you can see, in this Javascript-heavy test Firefox on Ubuntu is upwards of 17% slower than it is under Windows. As this performance gap manifests itself largely under Javascript-heavy situations; regular browsing doesn’t show nearly the difference. Flash is also slower, but this has nothing to do with Firefox and more to do with Flash’s mediocre performance under any OS that isn’t Windows.
The last caveat is one of how Ubuntu’s distribution model becomes strained when it comes to Firefox. Ubuntu Hardy shipped nearly 2 months before Firefox 3 did. But because Ubuntu is meant to be a stable platform they still needed to package Firefox 3 with the OS, so Firefox 3 Beta 5 was included. If we had done this article a month after Hardy launched as intended, I’d have few nice things to say. Firefox 3 Beta 5 combined with Adobe Flash 9 was buggy, unstable junk. Canonical made the right decision as the final version of Firefox 3 turned out well, but it highlights the pitfalls of including 3rd party software with the OS.
The flip side of this caveat is that Firefox 3.5.x has superseded 3.0.x as the newest Firefox branch, which means that only 3.0.x versions are being pushed out to Hardy. This means if you want to take advantage of any of Firefox’s newest features such as the new javascript engine, you’ll need to install a 3.5.x build separately, ideally through a PPA package so that it cleanly replaces the default version of Firefox.
But even with those caveats, none of them are serious issues. Firefox 3 is still a fantastic browser and there’s nothing else I’d rather have on Ubuntu.
Final Verdict: Meets My Needs
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
195 Comments
View All Comments
sadf23ssaaa - Monday, March 22, 2010 - link
Welcome to our website:jordan air max oakland raiders $34--39;
Ed Hardy AF JUICY POLO Bikini $25;
Christan Audigier BIKINI JACKET $25;
gstar coogi evisu true jeans $35;
coach chanel gucci LV handbags $36;
coogi DG edhardy gucci t-shirts $18;
CA edhardy vests.paul smith shoes $32;
jordan dunk af1 max gucci shoes $37;
EDhardy gucci ny New Era cap $16;
coach okely Adidas CHANEL DG Sunglass $18;
zerobug - Monday, February 1, 2010 - link
Regarding benchmarks and Linux-focused hardware roundups, one thing worth of consideration is that while Microsoft places strong resources on O/S development to create features that will require the end users the need to get the latest and greatest powerful hardware, Linux places their efforts in order that the end user will still be able to use their old hardware and get the best user experience while running the latest and greatest software.So,the benchmarks could compare the user experience when running popular software on Microsoft and Linux O/S's, with different powerful machines.
For this, you could pick up some popular open source and proprietary (or their free equivalents) application that can run both Linux and W7. and compare the price, time and power consumption for retrieving, saving, processing, compiling, encrypting,decrypting compacting, extracting, encoding, decoding, backup, restore, nº of frames,etc, with machines in a range of different CPU and memory capacities.
abnderby - Thursday, September 3, 2009 - link
Let me say this, I am a Senior Software QA Engineer, I have been testing windows, windows apps, DB's and web sites for over 10 year now. I am what you could consider an windows guru of sorts.I have off an on always gone and tried linux from red hat 5, 6, ubuntu, suse, fedora etc... Linux is not and has not been ready for mainstream users. Sure simple email, word docs web browsing it is ok.
But in order to do many things I want to do and many advanced windows users the author and many commentors are right. Linux people need to get out of their little shell and wake up.
Linux has such great potential to be a true contenderto windows and OSX. But it lacks simple usability. Out of the box it can come nowhere close to MS or Apple offerings. The out of the box experience is truly horrible.
Hardware drivers? good luck I run RAID cards that have no support. Forget the newest graphics and sound cards. Connecting to shares just as the author mentioned a hassle of a work around.
Again as stated elsewhere Linux needs someone who programs and or scripts to get things done right. I have neitherthe time or patience for such. I use command line when needed. I would rather have 2 or 3 clicks and I am done then have to remember every CLI for every thing I need to do.
Time is money, time is not a commodity. Linus wastes too much time.
It is geting better with each distro true. But It has been 11 years from red hat 5?? and Linux is not a whole lot better than it was then.
What is needed if Linux really wants to make a stand in the desktop space, is a unified pull togeher ofall distro's. Sit down and truly plan out the desktop. Put together a solid platform that out of the box can really put the hurt on MS or Apple.
Look what Apple did with OSX! And how many developers are wrking on it? How many developers are working on Linux all distro's? OSX is a jewel in 7 years it has matured much farther than any *nix distro. And has a following that cannot yet be challenged by any distro available.
Why is it that when win2k came out Linux was claiming to be superior, and yet after 10 years of development it is hardly comparable to XP let alonevista/win 7 or OSX?
You guys really need to wake up and smell the coffee!
Penti - Monday, September 7, 2009 - link
Of course it's not ready for consumer desktops, there are no serious distributions for that.It means no DVD player OOB, no proprietary codecs, no video editing software, no proprietary drivers which works magically. Of course not is SLED and RHEL Desktop ready for normal users it's targeted for Linux admins to set up the environment. Community distributions won't have as easy time to be set up by those. Community distros will also always lack the above mentioned stuff. It's simply not legal for them to offer it OOB. OS X is actually older then Linux and ran on x86 before Apple bought Jobs NeXT company. It's also supported by an OEM. (OEM = Themselves). Which no Linux dist is. It also uses many GNU technologies like GCC, X11 (optional but included on disc), bash shell and so on, and of course SAMBA for SMB/CIFS, on the server edition they use a modified openldap server, dovecot and postfix for mail, Apache, PHP, Perl, MySQL etc. Stuff thats developed on Linux and has matured thanks to it.
There's a lot of problems with having just community supported stuff, but that doesn't mean it's useless or sucks. Sure the kernel aren't really helping getting drivers in there, by locking out closed source stuff but they end up useless if they are proprietary and not updated any way. For the servers just buy RHEL or SLES certified stuff and you get all the hardware support-needed. But on the other hand you wouldn't be much successful in running 7 year old video drivers in Windows either. Community distros definitively don't need to cease existing for the creation of a commercial one. But there will never be one linux and that's really the beauty of it not the course. It wasn't meant to be something rivaling windows and the kernel developers has no desire to create a distro. That's why we can see Linux in stuff like Android and Maemo. And from home routers to mainframes and supercomputers. For a commercial entity targeting that many devices wouldn't be possible. Not with the same basic code and libraries. There are definitively some top notch products and solutions based on Linux and GNU. But Linux doesn't want anything as it's not an entity. And it's really up to GNOME and KDE to create the desktop environment. It's not the distros that shape them and write all the libraries that software developers use to create their software. As there are no major consumer desktop distro maker there is also no one that can really steer them by sponsoring work and holding discussions either. Not towards a unified desktop environment for normal non-tech users anyway. Also GNOME and KDE has no desire to create a exclusive platform around their software. OS X is a innovative 20 year old OS (since commercial release) and is actually based on work before then (BSD code). OS X UI is really 20 years into it's making and builds heavily on the next/openstep framework. On other Unixes there hasn't been any such heritage to build on, X was an total mess on commercial Unixes and I would actually say it's a lot better and more streamline now. There's just Xorg now, sure there are a lot of window managers but only two major environments now so it's still better then when all the vendors had it's own and couldn't make up it's mind on which direction to go and standardize on. In the middle of the 90's there where like at least 4 major Unix vendors that all had their own workstations.
fazer150 - Friday, September 4, 2009 - link
which Linux distro have you tried? did you try the PCLinuxOS which is atleast as usable as windows xp, 2003?nilepez - Sunday, August 30, 2009 - link
Most end users are not comfortable with the command line. Linux, even Ubuntu, is still not ready for the masses. This shouldn't be confused with the quality of the OS. It's mostly GUI issue. I've also had some issues with installers failing. Some were solved from an xterm and others just didn't work.It wasn't a big deal in most cases, because there's generally another program that can get the job done, but for the typical home user, it's a deal killer. Nevertheless, I must give credit where credit is due, and Ubuntu has made huge strides in the right direction. The UI isn't close to Windows 7 and I suspect it's not close to OS X either, but Canonical is moving in the right direction.
Etern205 - Thursday, August 27, 2009 - link
See this is the problem with some of linux users, you guys are some what always closed in a nutshell. What you may think is easy does not mean the rest of the world will agree with you. In this day and age, people what to get things done quickly and use the least amount of time as possible. For Mac OS X and Windows getting a simple task done takes like 3 simple clicks, for Ubuntu performing the same tasks requires the user to do extensive amount of research just to complete it.I'm glad this article was written by a author who has not head into linux terriroty before and it shows the true side of linux from the perspective of a new user.
If you like to do ramen coding and so forth does not mean the others will. If linux want's to become mainstream, then they really need to stand in the shoes of Joe or Jane.
forkd - Saturday, October 31, 2009 - link
I use mac, windows and linux and I must disagree with your assessment of "this is the problem with some linux users"This article, and this site for that matter, comes from the perspective of a windows (and some mac) user looking at linux. More specifically Ubuntu. From this point of view of course Linux is difficult. A person who is linux focused thinks windows is difficult at first too and is likely to criticize. If you take the time to learn something instead of just criticizing something because it is different you may be a lot happier.
fepple - Thursday, August 27, 2009 - link
Check out all the usability studies the Gnome Project does, then come back and make some more generalization :)SoCalBoomer - Thursday, August 27, 2009 - link
Again - those are done by Linux people. His points are right on. . .someone a while ago did a "Mom" test, which is closer to what is needed, not people who know computers doing studies on usability.