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Firefox Faster In Wine Than Native
An anonymous reader writes "Tuxradar did some benchmarks comparing Firefox's Windows and Linux JavaScript performance. 'We did some simple JavaScript benchmarks of Firefox 3.0 using Windows and Linux to see how it performed across the platforms — and the results are pretty bleak for Linux.' Later on, they tried Wine. 'The end result: Firefox from Mozilla or from Fedora has almost nil speed difference, and Firefox running on Wine is faster than native Firefox.'"
Check the doco
Firefox 3.0 built for Windows was PGOed (Profile Guided Optimisation)
PGO was not yet enabled for linux builds
Try a newer build.
FAIL
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
except I'm using Linux
On the flip side, the pop-unders I get from my local newspaper's site under Firefox don't happen under Linux, only Windows.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
Wine isn't an emulator. It's a set of libraries that try to mimic Windows. Since it's well known that Windows relies on the monolithic, do-it-all library architecture, it has the speed edge due to the fact that many functions don't need to force a context switch. The "Unix way", OTOH, relies on the safer and more resilient "do one thing well" multiple library concept, so while it may be easier to bugfix, the resulting program (Firefox in this case) spends an inordinate amount of time in context switches.
But are we really going to try to maximize speed over durability?
What I "lose" in javascript performance, I think I more than make up for in not wasting any cpu cycles on anti-virus crud.
I'm not at all sure how relevant these synthetic tests are. I use Ubuntu 8.10 on a 2 year old laptop and it honestly feels snappier now than it did when it was running XP. Maybe some things are slower and some things are faster. Beats me, as I'm too busy actually using it for real work to be bothered benchmarking it. But on the whole, it certainly "feels faster" now.
Best,
More interested in Firefox 3.1 JavaScript speed!
GPLv2: I want my rights, I want my phone call! DRM: What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
Mozilla created Firefox for Windows, and then they made a half-assed version for Linux. I'm not really surprised that the Windows version runs faster. Wine usually runs programs at about the same speed as the Windows version. Sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less.
I don't see how this "looks bleak for Linux." Damn trolls.
For everyone else in the world who does not know what PGO is maybe some details on why it is not enabled would be helpful.
If Firefox ran faster in Wine than in native Windows, that would be great news. As it is, it's undoubtedly because Firefox's code is optimized for Windows, rather than Linux.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Seriously, how fast does a web browser *need* to be? I've never been using Firefox on Linux and thought to myself that it was prohibitively or even annoyingly slow.
Reading TFA, in most cases, the differences in times don't seem dramatic, either, so who really cares?
And isn't there another story out there that says that Firefox is faster on Linux than on Microsoft? So what they are saying is,that Firefox is faster in Wine than it is on native Linux. which is still faster than Firefox on Windows.
CAPS LOCK: ITS LIKE THE CRUISE CONTROL FOR AWESOME
It's not just JavaScript, the whole damn thing feels sluggish in Linux compared to the Windows build. It's really annoying, particularly if I'm trying to show how "fast" Linux is when compared to Windows. Yes I know Firefox /= Linux, but it's a primary application so if that is running slow, it's not a good sign.
The only conclusion I can gather is GTK is damn slow. Maybe the upcoming rewrite with QT (so I hear) will be more zippy.
If the results are confirmed, could it be because it uses the GTK2 widgetset?
i usually develop on Linux, and test against Konqueror and Firefox 3, and periodically fireup a KVM virtual machine running winXP for testing against IE, Chrome, and Firefox (again).
when doing heavy JS animations, and even more when using Canvas, it's pretty obvious that FF on windows is far smoother than on Linux, even with the VM overhead.
I'd say that there are lots of optimizations that the FF/Linux dev team left out.
-Kz-
Firefox Faster In Wine
And here I was thinking inebriation led to slower brain functions!
The disappearing pencil trick. Let me show you it.
Since when does measuring JavaScript performance automatically indicates if a browser is faster or not? Op honestly didn't phrase the subject well.
And why all these "JavaScript benchmarks"? Is it common for people to do matrix math with it or what?
So now all of a sudden having a responsive application, which doesn't crash and/or eats all of the available memory and does the job without me thinking that I'm driving on a snail doesn't matter?
They should be looking elsewhere.
By default Firefox for Linux uses shared system libraries rather than statically linking them altogether as the Windows version does. That's bound to have an impact on performance because code and data pages will be all over the place. Type "about:buildconfig" into the browser and it will tell you its build settings.
In theory if you have the web browser the performance of the Anti-Virus running on different CPU so you are not getting any real speed savings. So if you have a slow web browser you still have a slow web browser with or without Anti-Virus. (Yes I know it is more complex then that, wait time for sharing IO, Joining Busses etc...)
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I dual boot between Windows XP and Ubuntu GNU/Linux (of the Intrepid Ibex flavor).
Firefox is slow on Linux in general. Page Up, Page Down, Arrow Up, Arrow Down, Ctrl+Plus and Ctrl+Minus (to increase and decrease the font size)...all of these things are instantaneous on Windows XP, but there's a noticeable lag on Linux.
I'm not sure what the problem is. I'm using the proprietary ATI drivers on Linux, which should be pretty fast. And my machine is old enough that all the kinks should have been worked out of the Linux drivers for my hardware.
The benchmarks say otherwise. You are welcome to reproduce the tests on your own and post the results, I'd be interested to see them.
... RTFA
Switch from Ubuntu to LFS, only level 10+ dwarves are allowed there.
You don't need a clear understanding to be able to tell that it runs faster. It's very noticeable.
Running firefox in TinyXP in Virtualbox is faster then native on my Ubuntu......
PS. My captcha is 'rejoice'
What I "lose" in javascript performance, I think I more than make up for in not wasting any cpu cycles on anti-virus crud.
Firefox in _Wine_, not Win. TFA was still using Linux, but was using Wine on top of Linux, with Windows version of FF.
happy for non-technical reasons, but I continue to use Swiftfox on Linux because it is so damned much faster than Fedora's Firefox build.
I know that there is a CPU optimization difference, but I haven't looked into other differences. Someone who has looked at the buildconfig for both and/or who knows about the build processes and configurations of both: is the reason for the slowness in the comparison referenced in this post related at all to something that Swiftfox is fixing?
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
But those benchmarks are done by a f'n noob! How can you possibly trust them?
I think it stands as a testamant to the WINE folks. I know Linux distros and the various Window Managers - KDE/Xfce/IceWM/Gnome - have to handle things that Wintendo doesn't, as it is integrated into the OS from the get-go.
However, the results are not that dramatic. I'd be curious to see a few things, including how Native FF runs in KDE with the Gnome libraries loading up. (I run KDE.)
Also of note - I've posted before on lists that "starting" Word 2003 takes about half the time as it does to "start" OpenOffice 2.x on my distribution. I run CrossoverOffice and have Office 2003 loaded. My guess is that there may be something in Wine that optimizes these processes.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
My experience of using Ubuntu via wubi (i.e.a file image stored on an NTFS disk) is that the performance is hit severly by the ntfs-3g process. Run top while performing mild disk activity and you'll see what i mean. If you use it regularly you might want to use dual boot instead.
With all the (good natured) cracks about compile time, Gentoo finally wins a round!
Seriously though, not only does firefox feel faster than other distros, but it's noticably faster than Window XP. And it goes all the way down to the little things. The pages seem to render faster. When I click on a shortcut link I have saved on the desktop, it takes Gentoo Firefox about 2-3 seconds to open. This very same task using the same version of Firefox takes about 8 seconds on Windows XP. Now I don't know why the Windows version takes longer, and out of fairness I honestly don't care. Reason being, when something doesn't work right in Linux (i.e compositing), it just doesn't work - no excuses accepted regardless of who's fault it is.
(In the sake of fairness, I will admit I am running a 32Bit version of WindowsXP, while my Gentoo installation is completely 64-Bit. I would have ran XP 64-Bit, I didn't want the driver/game issues...)
what FireFox would do on tequila! Mucho rapido.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You're talking about what Linux was like 6 years ago. Now it's no harder than Windows.
No ascii art.
Firefox is way more stable in my experience under MS Windows (and maybe WINE?) than under LINUX/X.
Admittedly I'm probably more of a 'power user' than most, but the thing that kills me about LINUX Firefox
is its GROSS instability under heavy load (e.g. problematic on both Fedora and Ubuntu 64 bit editions anyway).
It takes anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of hours of ordinary use in order for it to just crash and close down on me with no core dump.
This is on systems with 8GB RAM (so it is not a resource shortage), not using FLASH or similar plugins, and not always / generally using proprietary ATI/NVIDIA video drivers. Admittedly this often occurs with a high number of windows/tabs open (e.g. 85 windows, 500 tabs) -- just because that's a normal evolution of me leaving stuff open instead of closing them. However I've had it crash similarly frequently when only a few dozen windows/tabs are open, so it isn't strictly a super heavy load issue. Generally the crash is accompanied by some X windows system error, BadIDChoice or such. Here's a ~ 2 year old Ubuntu "confirmed" bug report listing very similar crash problems, though the exact X error seems like it could be a bit different here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/97492
I just don't get their LINUX quality control, this happens so repeatedly over numerous 3.X versions of FF that I must assume that an automatic test script that repeatedly opened / closed a few hundred windows mocking normal usage would repeatedly trigger this, yet after apparently a couple of years of the problem being unresolved I still see no diagnosis / workaround / fix.
This just doesn't happen under MS Windows, though I tend to load down XP / Vista SLIGHTLY less with open tabs / windows than on LINUX, but on LINUX I can run FF for hours or days if I'm lucky. On MS Windows I can run it for days or weeks, so this is rather embarrassing / frustrating since in all other day to day use respects LINUX tends to be equal or superior to MS Windows in stability / functionality.
No chrome (yuck), super unstable firefox, konqueror just doesn't compare, opera I'm not a fan of == unhappy LINUX browsing.
One thing Chrome got right is one system process per window, at least a single error doesn't take down HUNDREDS of open browser windows. Even better would be true error recovery so that any error would just cause the affected threads / tabs to be reloaded with no loss of context and not having the whole browser crash. The automatic crashed session recovery is about the only thing that has kept me using FF on LINUX, though it sucks to wait like 20 minutes for your pages to reload, and then never perfectly (lost form data / buggy reload processes / whatever).
I've never done any benchmarks, but Firefox certainly FEELS faster in Ubuntu and Fedora than it did in XP or now Vista. I haven't tried Wine, but it does seem a tad faster in my XP VM than it did in native XP.
Anyway, I for one don't care until the differences are are noticeable during normal use. The rest is academic or even just pointless.
The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.
No it fucking isn't. I have the same setup Gentoo-amd64 vs WinXP. Try, I don't know, switching tabs. Changing font size. Scrolling up and down. Firefox on Linux is much more sluggish.
I have a dual boot XP / Ubuntu on my Asus EEE 1000H.
Firefox feels more responsive under XP then it is under Ubuntu.
I use the eee-pc kernel and I turn down all the visual extras both under Ubuntu and XP. Also Firefox runs with the same addons: Adblock, Flashblock and NoScript.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
The article is saying that the Windows version under Wine runs faster than the Linux version. It does not compare it to the Windows version running under Windows and you do not need Vista to reproduce the result.
Most likely the Windows version on Windows is faster than the Windows version on Wine, and thus faster than the Linux version as well. However as far as the article is concerned, it could be slower than either one. It is not relevant to the question.
In my experience this is for multiple reasons gnome, compiz, pango, flash... Try running it on a gentoo system compiled without pango and on kde. Probably will be faster and more responsive
with GCC, and Intel. Lets find out if the code base difference between Windows and Linux is the issue OR the compilers.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What do you have in your make.conf
CFLAGS="-march=k8 -O2 -pipe"
USE="mmx sse sse2"
MAKEOPTS="-j2"
How much ram do you have? I have 4GB DDR2. Do you use integrated graphics, or do you have a graphics card? I have an HD 3870. If you do have a graphics card, what drivers do you use? I use proprietary fglrx. I would ask what Desktop Environment you use, but the results were pretty much the same on both.
I don't know what your installation feels like, by my system is fast as shit under Gentoo. (and no, I'm not a fanboy. In fact, I'm very critical of the distro.)
I recently went through a round of attempting to use OpenSolaris on my work laptop (damn I want that ZFS juju)... and there were a couple of things that drove me back to Debian - one of them was the horrible performance of Firefox under OpenSolaris. Under VirtualBox on OpenSolaris host, Firefox was faster on either a Debian or a WinXP guest than it was on the host... the difference between usable and not. The specific application that really showed this was Zimbra (pretty heavily AJAXy). In trying to track this issue down, the general feedback on OpenSolaris forums was "Firefox on OpenSolaris kinda sucks, sorry". My personal experience with Firefox is that under Linux or Windows it's subjectively close enough not to worry about (on a variety of hardware, not just the laptop that I tested OpenSolaris on).
Check this doco, douche bag.
Firefox native on Linux is slower than Firefox for Windows on Wine on Linux. Fact!
That's really sad. Fact!
Citing SVN nightly builds, or similar, as a solution to deficient release builds is further failure, on your part. Fact!
Your inappropriate use of the word "fail", a verb, in the place of a noun further illustrates your ignorance, lack of education and possibly lack of general intelligence.
To put it in simple words that even you can understand; like Firefox for Linux, YOU fail it.
Browser response, not speed, is what annoys most people on Firefox, since version 1.
Instead, it's the lack of threading - that the notion "UI, the rending engine, and plugins should run in separate threads, with the UI thread having the highest priority".
Konqueror runs Flash player in its own process "nspluginviewer", which I can renice to 19 - just like how IE runs Flash in the lowest priority by default. Still, on Firefox 3, a few tabs running CPU-intensive Flash can still effectively freeze the browser UI.
Just sayin'
But FF's crappy performance/speed/response on Linux just really really sucks.
I keep looking for a new browser, but Konq + multimedia = crashtastic, midori & kahazekhaze are too overall unstable, and Epiphany is just under-featured. Opera isn't FOSS (which slays me--I love Opera like a little girl loves ponies, but I've got a pretty strong ethical committment to FOSS).
There's always elinks ;).
Now it's no harder than flushing your toilet.
There fixed it for you.
I am the lawn!
Think about it. If this WAS the problem, then running the windows version under Wine would not be faster. Wine still has to live on top of X and thus it would suffer from similar issues.
Now, it could be that the Linux port uses X BADLY and Wine uses X WELL, but that still doesn't make it an X problem.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Firefox really feels sluggish under Linux. On the same hardware Firefox is way more snappier, doesn't freeze and lag under Windows. When I set up Wine I also setup Firefox + Flash and it certainly was faster than the native versions. Youtube looked worse (lots of banding) but overall the responsiveness was much better than of the native versions.
Firefox DOES do that natively, that's why people complain about the high memory footprint. Seriously guys, this is why you can't have your cake and eat it, people will complain about either having it or eating it.
Don't bother replying to this guy. He posted the exact same comment in the post-beta windows 7 leak story that was posted.
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1126249&threshold=2&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=26836579
We get it you don't like linux. Just go away.
No, he's right. I still use Linux to distribute my TRON fanzines and personal Dungeons and Dragons web-sites. Although I have expanded its use to include presenting slideshows of my Sailor Moon hentai.
I ran the google v8 test 3 times and took the high on my Ubuntu machine, the results: Firefox linux: 68 Firefox wine: 104
Back in the days of Pentium 200mhz, I was running Slackware whose compile target was i386. Many of the applications could be speeded up by recompiling just a few of the most used libraries with optimizations for my AMD K6. Obviously the kernel was custom rolled, and at the time there was a different version of gcc available, called pgcc which generated even faster code for pentium computers.
I remember looking through the list of libraries my most used applications were linked with, and went through them re-compiling them. This was before Gentoo ever existed. I broke my system trying to install an optimized version of libc5.
Obviously, as mentioned in the article, almost no-one compiles their own systems these days, we just have to rely on the distributions to take care of that for us.
I rebooted today after 42 days of uptime, and that includes 42 days of uptime of FF3 under Mandriva 2007.1. No crashes, not a one.
One thing I'd immediately observe, are you using a compositing window manager? Turn that crap off, nothing destabilizes X apps more than compiz and friends.
Other than that, I don't know, but your experience is totally opposite mine. Not only is FF3 adequately fast, it is perfectly stable. I can't say if it would be faster in windows or not because I don't HAVE windows and don't need it, but it is a perfectly fine browser as is.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
"Your inappropriate use of the word "fail", a verb, in the place of a noun further illustrates your ignorance, lack of education and possibly lack of general intelligence." OH NO, someone used a word in a way that is not proper English. Kill his creativity the language must be protected. It was an internet expression that is often use. FAIL you is!
But their system seemed to be a decent one with well enough memory to run Firefox without any swapping to disk. Unless the benchmarks are doing things that cause Firefox to use an inordinate amount of memory, I don't see how this PGO would make a difference. For instance on a machine with no writeable disk or swap, it shouldn't make a difference at all.
...
One of the most useful aspects of profile data is when it can show statistical bias in which way conditional code usually branches. Then the compiler can optimize for the usual path so it pipelines better on the processor, and the unusual case will get the slower, pipeline-stalling branch instructions to process the unusual code path.
Profiling isn't needed to say which piece of code to optimize, but HOW to optimize a given section of code better. In the absence of profiling data, the compiler has to statically guess at these choices with no information about the usual data that will be in given registers, etc.
A separate topic is profiler-driven human optimization, e.g. where hotspots are discovered and then engineers are tasked with rewriting certain bits of code to use more efficient algorithms (or hand-coded assembly). Compilers don't know how to do this on their own, except in limited experimental forms where they can iteratively "experiment" with different optimization solutions and use profiling to see if they are getting better or worse. This isn't a replacement for human intelligence to re-engineer parts of the software, however.
I've often said that FireFox felt clunky on Linux. Which is one of the many reasons I use Opera. It's faster in Linux than it is in Windows, but where I use Windows (at work) it's still faster than FF, Chrome or IE.
Plus it is just better suited to my surfing style.
Mod up.
Swap usage is 0 for both Firefox for Linux and Firefox for Windows (via Wine). This is virtually always the case with any healthy Linux system. Windows users generally don't understand this even the smarter ones. They always seem to bring swap usage into a Linux discussion where it makes no sense.
If Firefox is better under Wine than as a Native Linux application then it has something other than swap file "thrashing" impacting its performance because it isn't happening here.
export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1
Looks like they need another set of eyes over there.
Epic fail.
Sunspider (total only - lower is better)
win 32 bit = 2936.4ms, win 64 bit = 3602.0ms, linux 64 bit = 3383.6ms
V8 (total only - higher is better)
win 32 bit = 201, win 64 bit = 156, linux 64 bit = 157
Dromaeo (total only - higher is better)
win 32 bit = 43.41runs/s, win 64 bit = 35.78runs/s, linux 64 bit = 30.69runs/s
So while the totals are slightly misleading, FF under linux beats FF under windows in 2 out of 3 tests.
(if you compare non optimised versions rather than cherry picking)
Dual Xeon Quad 2.33GHz, 12 GB RAM, 250 GB drives
Fedora 9 x86-64
Win XP pro 64
All copies of FF from Mozilla, not distro.
FTW
GTK+ has dog-slow performance. This is common knowledge. The developers are more interested in wiz-bang features than quality high-performance software.
cache misses are __WAY__ more expensive than subroutine calls.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Also depends on your CPU...
AMD cpus tend to perform considerably faster in 64bit mode while Intel are generally only slightly quicker... Also, gcc generates better code for AMD while Intel concentrate more on their own compiler.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
And disturbingly, many distros are still compiled for i386, even those that won't actually run on such systems...
Not sure about windows, but i imagine it's compiled for i686 at the least...
OSX is compiled for core1 (x86 with sse3).
I think the desktop linux distros should target a p3 as a bare minimum, and leave anything below that to specialized cut down distributions. I doubt many people are running XP on lesser systems, and noone will be running Vista on a P3 let alone anything slower.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
This reminds me of the setup I use with the laptop the company issued me. It's a nice Dell laptop, except that it came with XP, and for a variety of reasons I can't blow XP away and put a Real OS (tm) on it. I have an older Toshiba laptop that runs Linux (and only Linux), and it's my network tool: plug it in and it talks to things, every time. It's saved my butt (and the company's) on many occasions.
My solution: Linux (Slackware, naturally :-)
under Virtual PC. Except that Linux on a virtual
system works better than XP does on
the real hardware.
The networking may actually be faster, and
all the usual network stuff, including NFS and X, works
just fine.
There's got to be a lesson there somewhere, but I can't quite figure out what it is.
...laura
which is faster, Firefox on Wine, or Firefox on Windows... both on identical hardware...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Remember that we use browsers for a LOT these days. A small slowdown on an hourly basis multiplied by the number of workers using it turns into real scratch.
It is in our best interest to make sure the most used software is as fast as it possibly can be.
The stuff that's used just now and then, we shouldn't care so much about.
Also, Wine would need more context switches than either Linux or Windows. If you are running a single process you usually switch between at most two contexts, your userspace process and the kernel. However since the functionality of the Linux kernel isn't a perfect match for the Windows kernel, Wine needs an additional context/process, the wineserver, to provide this functionality. So context switches wouldn't benefit wine over plain Linux.
has anyone tried to use MSVC to cross compile for linux in order to have a faire comparison ?
Firefox appears to be using an inefficient method to render the content to the screen. If a load up a page in Firefox and drag the window around fast, the content inside the window tears and blurs and stays that way for a second after I stop whipping the window around. Konqueror and Opera don't do this.
step out of the 90s buddy, todays GNU/Linux is not your hippy geeks OS any more. I've got 70 something year old grandmothers using it, teens, and in-betweens. And when there is something they must have and is only available in a Windows app, virtual machines solve that issue.
it does amaze me how many times I try to run something across a self-described Windows geeks and they have no idea what I'm talking about. It's as if technology only emanates from Microsoft and as if the "We are a Microsoft shop" is a badge of ignorance or something. Get out and try something new every now and then. You will be surprised at what new things are turning up outside your fracturing Windows. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
And disturbingly, many distros are still compiled for i386, even those that won't actually run on such systems...
Are you sure? debian compile for 486 and current debian will still just about run on a 486. I think ubuntu and fedora compile for 686 but i'm not positive.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
On my HP Compaq 8510w laptop with 3gb ram, I got totally different results. Firefox 3.0.6 was used in both Windows & Linux. At least I am happy Linux user, even I still have dual boot on my machine.
Linux ubuntu-810 2.6.27-11-generic #1 SMP Thu Jan 29 19:24:39 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
Total: 4006.6ms +/- 1.3%
3d: 471.8ms +/- 9.4%
cube: 168.4ms +/- 19.6%
morph: 176.4ms +/- 17.7%
raytrace: 127.0ms +/- 14.5%
access: 573.8ms +/- 5.5%
binary-trees: 85.0ms +/- 29.3%
fannkuch: 197.8ms +/- 16.5%
nbody: 188.0ms +/- 6.8%
nsieve: 103.0ms +/- 19.7%
bitops: 452.4ms +/- 11.3%
3bit-bits-in-byte: 87.6ms +/- 43.8%
bits-in-byte: 98.4ms +/- 32.6%
bitwise-and: 125.4ms +/- 12.6%
nsieve-bits: 141.0ms +/- 20.7%
controlflow: 61.8ms +/- 45.3%
recursive: 61.8ms +/- 45.3%
crypto: 256.0ms +/- 26.4%
aes: 93.0ms +/- 18.3%
md5: 81.0ms +/- 50.7%
sha1: 82.0ms +/- 42.8%
date: 415.0ms +/- 15.3%
format-tofte: 243.6ms +/- 11.5%
format-xparb: 171.4ms +/- 23.0%
math: 467.8ms +/- 11.9%
cordic: 165.2ms +/- 22.5%
partial-sums: 197.0ms +/- 9.8%
spectral-norm: 105.6ms +/- 33.2%
regexp: 306.4ms +/- 11.0%
dna: 306.4ms +/- 11.0%
string: 1001.6ms +/- 4.3%
base64: 142.8ms +/- 4.9%
fasta: 228.0ms +/- 16.3%
tagcloud: 181.6ms +/- 16.6%
unpack-code: 325.8ms +/- 3.4%
validate-input: 123.4ms +/- 20.8%
Windows XP SP3
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
Total: 4917.4ms +/- 4.3%
3d: 564.2ms +/- 13.9%
cube: 209.2ms +/- 6.0%
morph: 164.4ms +/- 37.6%
raytrace: 190.6ms +/- 6.7%
access: 779.4ms +/- 9.2%
binary-trees: 116.2ms +/- 5.4%
fannkuch: 328.4ms +/- 4.2%
nbody: 189.4ms +/- 28.5%
nsieve: 145.4ms +/- 37.9%
bitops: 650.4ms +/- 32.3%
3bit-bits-in-byte: 155.0ms +/- 43.7%
bits-in-byte: 174.8ms +/- 29.5%
bitwise-and: 131.0ms +/- 44.7%
nsieve-bits: 189.6ms +/- 29.4%
controlflow: 94.4ms +/- 40.8%
recursive: 94.4ms +/- 40.8%
crypto: 409.2ms +/- 31.0%
I use Firefox on an old Prescott P4 with 2 GB of RAM and WinXP. It's really slower than the version 2.x specially the adress bar. Sad, because the main reason I have switch to it is performance...
PS: I RTFA and see nothing about Wine into it, it's speak on XP only
I'll bet the biggest difference is caused by the choice of compilers. The windows compiler has been optimized for x86, while gcc has to optimize for numerous targets.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Yeah yeah we have been hearing that this is going to be "The Year of Linux on Desktops" for how long now? It is starting to sound like a broken record. Unless there is a massive paradigm shift in the public, Linux will forever be the OS of geeks. Don't worry though, your ubernerd status is still secure here at Slashdot.
Javascript is slower on the Linux build.
Well, that makes me even happier that I run No-Script due to security paranoia.
Whether or not it's worth the effort to "fix" the Linux build is another matter.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
GCC does everything MSVC does, and more
This is simply not true. From the chart, Microsoft has Fastcall, disabling exception handling, simple member functions, and GCC does not. Additionally, the chart also incorrectly states that Microsoft does not have an option for fast but imprecise floating point. It does.
On the flipside, MSVC++ has whole program optimization, which GNU calls LTO. LTO doesn't exist for GNU yet. See here:
http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/LinkTimeOptimization
Scroll down and read. Pretty much, LTO looks to require a new C/C++ parser. That's not going to happen overnight.
This is my sig.
What does Wine use to emulate GDI and USER? I'd be willing to bet that their implementation of widgets is faster than whatever native widget kit that Firefox uses...
This is my sig.
Can you compile Firefox & Ubuntu yourself and get better performance, then?
I'm not sure what the secret to success is, but the secret to failure lies in trying to please everyone -Bill Cosby
I always build gentoo with --dwarf-min-level 100
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
This may be news for Firefox but it is not news for many other Windows aps in Wine. Wine under Linux consistently outperforms Windows.
Hio. I'm running a 1.5.3 xorg server under KDE 4.2. When I disable Desktop Effects, FF 3.0.6 is very snappy, even with 100, 150 tabs open (spread over three windows). When I enable Desktop Effects, new windows take a little while (.5->1 second) to draw. Tab switching is instantaneous, though.
Underlying hardware:
Core Duo L2400
4GB DDR2 RAM
Intel Mobile 945GM Express
Actually they did both. Maybe you should go read the article. :)
... the Wine widget set is faster than the GNOME widget set. News at 11.
In addition to the differences in optimization already mentioned, it also makes a big difference whether you run applications isolated (which is what running under WINE is) or as part of a desktop; when running as part of a (Linux) desktop, there's a lot of other code a browser talks to and waits for.
No, he's right. I still use Linux to distribute my TRON fanzines and personal Dungeons and Dragons web-sites.
websight!
I don't know why, but even under complete OS virtualization FireFox is faster in Windows under VMWare or VirtualBox than it is natively on the same box.
I've got 70 something year old grandmothers using it, teens, and in-betweens.
Ha ha ha. That's hilarious. Even a little bit kinky. You nearly covered all the stereotypes.
it does amaze me how many times I try to run something across a self-described Windows geeks and they have no idea what I'm talking about.
That's because they don't live in your dreamworld where the Linux geeks have taken over.
"When you see a unixer brainwashed beyond saving, kick him out of the door." - Xah Lee
This will go unnoticed, but what the heck.
I was able to greatly improve the reactivity of both firefox and opera by moving the cache onto tmpfs systems. Actually, I moved full rc directories (.opera and .mozilla) and just rsync them from time to time.
Caveat - I have a sort of an improvised SSD (using a CF card and an adapter), which is quite slow esp. for concurrent writes. But maybe this is why I noticed it at all. I don't understand why the browsers insist on writing tons of data onto the hard drive when there's plenty of perfectly good memory lying around.
Cheers,
j.
I don't know enough about WINE to know, what's the heap manager in WINE? Would it fall through to glibc's malloc, which is known to be suboptimal or something else?
I see, keep em stupid and keep em paying. And MS Excel makes a great source control tool. Yes, I've seen a business using it for this. Ignorance is bliss seems to be a way of life for many a Windows shop. And it is not about GNU/Linux, it's about knowing there are tools out there for both Windows and/or GNU/Linux which do the task designed for quite well.
It's not about "The Year of the Linux Desktop" it is about another year of "Open Source Illiterate Windows IT people". IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I don't understand what this continual battle over browser speed is all about. Surely 99% of the delay on any page is fetching the data off the internet? Who cares if 8ms or 10ms of the 500ms delay is due to browser speed. Is this really relevant to the normal user? Is this just universities on the internet backbone trying to measure tiny delays in some browser pissing contest?
Unicorn Setu. "Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines".
I think i386 became difficult to support a few years ago now, needing a few special tweaks to some things and even then, it was admitted there was becoming unlikely that anyone would still be wanting to use a modern distribution on them. There are plenty of old distributions available that can still be downloaded if anyone should so wish to play around with an i386... but yeah, i486 support shouldn't be on the agenda anymore for a modern desktop orientated distribution.
There always be some being used as routers, or small home servers though, even as X terminals. Maybe someone is even reading this on one.
Just switch to Opera and performance won't be an issue. It's by far the fastest browser I've used.
It's amazing how my comment from at least 4 hours ago isn't visible at +2 minimum. On 64 bit, linux beats windows 2 to 1. ...
Assholes. And my remaining 2 mod points (2 days old) have disappeared
for the heck of it I ran the first benchmark listed, Sunspider and got a time of 2475.4 vs their run of 2478.6 - like them I am running XP SP3. But I did this on an ancient AMD Sempron 3000+, not a quad-core Intel Core 2 running at 2.66GHz, with 4GB of RAM. Oh.. and I was playing tunes using Billy.
So either the benchmark is bogus or.. you all have something to look forward to as it seems Firefox 3.1b3pre (Shiretoko) kicks some ass!
I guess the fixes mozilla does for crashes and memory leaks must be for the rest of us idiots that keep seeing it crash.
"Would it fall through to glibc's malloc, which is known to be suboptimal. . ."
Is anyone working on optimizing the glibc malloc()? I'm actually a little bit surprised - malloc has been in glibc, I would assume, since the very first versions of glibc, which would have been what, like 15 or 20 years ago?. I would have thought it would have been optimized a very long time ago, and continually improved over time. . .
gcc does have whole program optimization, which is a different thing from LTO.
Stuff all the source for a program into one dirty great file.... and compile with gcc -fwhole-program and the compiler can then make such happy optimizations as if a func is use only once anywhere, then it can always be inlined.
LTO means compile all your .c's into .o's and then at link time do an additional set of optimizations.
Truetype fonts generally contain some information for hinting purposes, i.e. they tell the font renderer (Freetype) the best way to render the character at small pixel sizes. The "bytecode interpreter" that makes use of such information is available in Freetype, but the method is patented (IIRC by Apple) in the U.S., so most distributions turn it off by default. Without such information, Freetype has to decide the small-size rendering method all by itself ("autohinting"), and some people may find the result blurry.
If you are not in the U.S. or don't care for software patents, there are plenty of information on the Internet about how to turn on the bytecode interpreter in Freetype. For example, in Fedora you can simply download Freetype's source RPM and recompile it with rpmbuild using some --with options.
As mentioned on the nedmalloc page, glibc uses ptmalloc which (on average) isn't that slow.
glibc 2.3's malloc certainly isn't optimal for every possible workload but it doesn't tend to be incredibly poor for any workload either. For Firefox on Linux switching to jemalloc didn't cause as big an improvement as it did on Windows.
Explorer, ironically, performs much better in wine than in native Windows.
Wow, when's the last time you used Linux?
I am not devoid of humor.
It blows that minor architecture differences need to create another project. Anybody know if Apple's got a patent on their CAFE BABE format? Seems like linux could pretty easily learn to exec a 'fat binary'. (maybe it already does?)
A smart, small, Mozilla updater could fetch the appropriate binary code from the 'net on first launch.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
On the test they have two OS's.
Windows NT and Linux (kernel)
Test had few different versions from Mozilla Firefox.
One what is compiled for Windows NT and other what was compiled for Linux.
Then on the test, intresting part is not that Windows is faster (well... it is, but not after other tests) but that Wine runs Firefox faster.
If Linux + Firefox is slower than Linux + Wine + Firefox... something is wrong between Internet Browser (Firefox) and the operating system (Linux kernel), because when using Wine, the typical system libraries and applications gets passed.
So, the real question actually is, why software between operating system (Linux kernel) and Internet Browser (Mozilla Firefox) slows down the Internet Browser so damn much?
We all know that Wine is not emulator but "swapper". And these tests proofs again that Wine can run software almost as fast as native versions on Windows systems.
As someones has already questioned speed of - as example - the GNU project glibc, the system library. Is it possible, that GNU software is actually so bloated, that Linux OS (kernel) can not run applications as fast it could? And you can swap any other software part to between Linux and Firefox, when thinkin where the problem might be.
At least what was proofed, was that Linux OS (kernel) can run Internet Browser as fast than on Windows platform, you just need Wine for that.
If Linux OS would be slower, then the Wine version would be on same level too.
So what can be tought from that? Simple, problems exist all over other places than Linux OS (kernel). You just need to find it and fix it... It can be even on the Mozilla's fault, on the Firefox version, if swapping all software between Linux OS and the Mozilla Firefox does not bring more speed. If more speed is gained, then about the gained speed, problem might be on elsewhere than Mozilla Firefox and Linux OS (kernel).
So, as Linux user, I dont blame it to be slow... I blame other software top of the operating system to being slow...
If Wine can do that, then so can ANY OTHER APPLICATION CODE! My point was just that if Wine hasn't got a problem then other code won't either IF it is written as well as Wine is. And if it is NOT written as well as Wine is, then why is it the problem of X?
Granted that the best solution is for X to be improved so it is easier for application writers to get good performance. So I don't see it as a black and white thing. Still, mozilla is a LARGE project with lots of resources, certainly at least as big as Wine. They should be able to make their code run fast.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
The first thing is I just don't see the whole 'firefox is so slow on Linux' thing. Maybe its just me, I don't use windows, but on my crufty old machine ff3 seems pretty quick. Even if it is rendering 4x slower than on windows I am just not sure what people are bitching about. Of course it could be faster, but calling it slow is a real overstatement IMHO. If I hit CTRL-+ any given page rerenders in 1-2 seconds, tops.
And secondly, if Render is slow and it doesn't seem to be getting faster as rapidly as everyone wants, then why aren't more resources being directed to that? xorg's progress seems glacial. If people already HAVE faster code, then get it in there. Between Intel, RH, Novel, IBM, Google, etc the resources needed to do that would appear to me to be trivial. 5 or 6 guys could be added to that effort without anyone even breaking a sweat. And if it is just all political, then screw the politics. Running code always trumps politics. If whoever is(n't) making progress on it now doesn't like that, to friggin bad for them, this stuff just has to get done and if they cannot deliver then they need to be sidelined.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
It's helpful to know that PGO is the reason the windows version works faster but it raises more questions than it answers:
* What *is* Profile Guided Optimisation (I might know, but for one person like me there are hundreds of others who don't)
* What build would happen to be newer than the CURRENT RELEASE for Fedora? A quick google doesn't doesn't point to an obvious location of a "firefox-pgo" or similar package. Casual users would struggle to find a PGO-built FF package as they would not be standard with their distro, or would be beta/pre-releases of FF 3.1.
* The test was only with Fedora--do any other Linux OSes package FF with PGO enabled as standard?
* How do the 64-bit editions compare? This was a 32-bit only test, and reader's posts aren't very specific. It looks like the only version of FF 3.0.x that IS PGO-built and widely distributed is the 32-bit version, because 64-bit Windows FF is even slower than the Linux version to Javascript from what little is posted.