Tab switching "feels" slower in epiphany than in firefox

[Lucas Nussbaum <lucas lucas-nussbaum net>]

Hi,

What I'm reporting is known as bug #347225. I reported it a few months
ago, while using a PCI ATI graphic card in my setup to be able to get dual
head to work using my laptop's dockstation.

What I reported back then is that switching between tabs in epiphany
"felt" a lot slower than in firefox. The problem only appeared when
using the 'ati' driver with the PCI card (which can be assumed to be
slow, even if it's quite recent). It wasn't noticeable when using the
fglrx driver with the laptop's internal video card.

Even if I cannot reproduce the problem anymore (I changed my setup to
avoid using the PCI card), I'm still interesting in understanding it.
Also, somebody commented today on the bug, reporting a similar issue
when switching from the nvidia proprietary driver to the 'nv' driver.

So, my questions are:
- is this a known problem ?
- whose fault (component-wise) is it ? (I'm not really familiar with
  GNOME development)
- what are the likely causes for this ?
- is this going to be improved ?

Others related questions:
- are people working on benchmarking the gnome frameworks with slow
  hardware ?
- Are there software tools to help diagnose such issues ? (based on
  traces analysis maybe ?)
- Are there software tools allowing to emulate a slower video card to
  make the detection of such issues easier ?

Many thanks,
-- 
| Lucas Nussbaum
| lucas lucas-nussbaum net   http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
| jabber: lucas nussbaum fr             GPG: 1024D/023B3F4F |