I've built an optimized version of FireFox 0.9.1, you can find it here.
Note, that due to it being SSE2 optimised, I don't think it will run on any older hardware!
I’m probably not the first person to do this, but I wanted to try it and it works. It seems a lot more responsive, and pages seem to display a lot quicker, but I can’t tell if it’s my imagination, or really faster.
So I would like the technical minded of my readers (If you don’t know what SSE2 is, or if you don’t know what FireFox is, you probably shouldn’t) to please download the .zip file, unzip it to a clean directory (install FireFox first from the official distribution if you haven’t already) and compare the two.
Sadly due to FireFox being clever about launching new instances, you can’t have them both running side by side. I did build it from the exact same code base that 0.9.1, just with lots of p4 specific optimizations turned on so it should just work. If this proves to be a useful thing I’ll start looking at optimizing the code itself.
I offer no warranty that it will even run, if you don’t know what you are doing, please do not download the zip file.
On a side note, if you haven’t tried FireFox yet, give it a whirl, it’s pretty good.
Again, if you missed it, the zip file can be found here.
Posted by Gareth at July 5, 2004 04:01 PM