Just as an experimentationalizationing trick, and because I do love knocking my head against walls, I recompiled both Kazehakase and XULRunner from source today, to see if it would perk up my browser rendering at all.

It’s still undecided, although I certainly hope it was worth the time. Kazehakase took only a minute or two (or five) to compile, but at 1Ghz, XULRunner was almost three hours in the making. Sheesh!

I have no real way of knowing if my efforts were in vain, and something tells me that recompiling with -march=pentium3 -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer isn’t going to be a huge difference over the i686 version I get from the Arch repos.

But it was an important experiment. And since I generally find it easier to recompile with the help of PKGBUILDS out of the Arch repositories, this tells me if it’s worth my time to try the same stunt in Ubuntu. I’ll decide on that another time. 🙂