[lug] Ubuntu Firefox v10.0.x Sluggishness & Fix (rantish)

[Lori Reed]

I'm running Ubuntu v10.04 LTS and after a recent upgrade from FF 3.x (I 
think) to 10.0.x I noticed an anomaly and experienced significant 
sluggishness when changing tabs or doing darn near anything.

The anomaly was that the spelling checker only recognized British 
spellings such as "colour", "analogue", and "recognise". Okay, that's 
annoying, but it's something I could live with.

But the sluggish behavior (often taking more than 10 seconds to respond 
to a mouse click) was making FF unusable, so yesterday I decided to dig 
in and find the cause.

My first thought was that it was due to one of the add-on extensions. So 
I disabled them all via Tools->Add-ons (AdBlock, Grease Monkey, 
Status-4-Evar, and Flash Video Downloader). Nothing. Nada. Zip.

So I explored the other tabs and under "Languages", found "English (GB) 
Language" with no description, and "English (South Africa) with the 
description, "Adds South African English support to the Firefox browser. 
All interfaces will be translated into South African English."

WTFBBQ? Disable that crap and restart Firefox stat!

Fixed. Including the spelling checker.

It's bad enough that Canonical wants to force me into using an unusable 
desktop interface, but this is ludicrous. I can't believe anyone who 
would actually want this "feature" would be willing to put up with the 
performance hit.

[/rant]

Lori Reed
www.Lightning-Rose.com