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Has anyone managed to get decent performances from Chromium on Ubuntu 14.04 (or later) ?

I find myself running Chromium 37 from a Ubuntu 12.04 chroot most of the time because it is so much more responsive (or the other way round, Chromium 49 on Ubuntu 14.04 is painfully slow here).

For example:

  • Disable all extensions and open https://www.facebook.com/U2
  • Press page down, eventually you get a "See more of U2 by logging into Facebook" popup.
  • Right click on the text inside and choose "Inspect" from the menu.

  • Time how long it takes for developers tools to come up and repaint the page.

    Chromium 37: 6s
Chromium 49: 13s !

Even just the popup menu from step 3 can take 1-2s to show up on Chromium 49.

I've already tried disabling gpu acceleration and disabling bootloader graphics, VESA framebuffer and PAT (I have an intel video card) but that didn't help.

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lemonsqueeze
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  • I don't think that using an ancient version of Chromium on an unsupported release of Ubuntu is ideal. Have you looked into other browsers, like Firefox and Epiphany? – grooveplex Oct 06 '16 at 17:20

1 Answers1

6

Problem solved:

Looks like using a profile inherited from previous versions of chromium was causing the issue. Recreating the same profile from scratch fixes it.

Chromium 52 is now as fast as Chromium 37 on both Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04.

The profile is stored in the user's ~/.config/chromium directory.
To move the existing profile aside and start from scratch:

  • Close Chromium

  • Open a terminal and do:

    $ mv ~/.config/chromium ~/.config/chromium.old

Chromium will create a new chromium directory next time you start it.
Now you can reinstall extensions, replicate settings, import bookmarks etc.

If you need to go back to the old profile, close Chromium and do:

$ mv ~/.config/chromium     ~/.config/chromium.new
$ mv ~/.config/chromium.old ~/.config/chromium
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