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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.'"
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,
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.
if you want to talk about monolithic, do-it-all library architecture... lets talk about glibc. does far far far more than any libc is needed to do.
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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-
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.
Serious question: What is glibc doing that you don't think it should be doing?
Elrond, Duke of URL
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"-Sam&Max
I find many websites prohibitively slow, but it has less to do with rendering performance than bad design. Few things are more annoying than staring at a blank page saying "439 of 440 files loaded".
(Well, ok, one thing. "This site requires flash"...)
My Sig: SEGV
>But are we really going to try to maximize speed over durability?
I was taught very early in my IT career that there are 3 considerations on any project.
1. It can be cheap
2. It can be fast
3. It can be reliable.
Now go and pick 2 out of 3.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Completely different sense of the word "profile" I believe.
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.
If it runs faster in Wine than either native on Windows or native on Linux, that'd be really cool. Or funny. Or sad. I'm not yet sure which.
All browsers are prohobitively slow at times. Not to mention their memory footprint.
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
You're talking about what Linux was like 6 years ago. Now it's no harder than Windows.
No ascii art.
No it's not. Due to developers having to foot the bill themselves, you don't get to choose one of your options. Open source software HAS to be cheap. Value is not measured in money you know. Money's just the in-between "equalizer". Value is measured in computers, development time, eyeballs, testers, people, management, internet servers, ... Just because you don't have to pay for something doesn't mean that the value you received wasn't created using resources.
Your argument would include stuff like "pirated games are free to produce for publishers". After all, there is no money involved in their "acquisition". More extreme, the same would be true for stolen goods.
Open source is only free for one side of the equation : it's only free for users, not for developers.
And for your career 1) Like what you do 2) Make lots of money 3) Operate within the law
Pick any two
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
And then there was silence.
I am the lawn!
You fail to realize that ultimately both versions of Firefox must eventually go through the same layers of Linux in order to do pretty much the same thing. The story is that the Windows version is still faster even though it has a whole extra layer to go through.
It is not even a comparison of Linux/Windows but of Linux and Linux+Wine.
The Linux build of Firefox is the problem here and has nothing to do with the trade-offs between how Windows does things and how Linux does things.
Besides, how can you say that everybody should fall on one side of the Performance/Reliability trade-off? Such things are case-by-case by definition.
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.
It's actually: "Attractive, single, sane - pick 2."
(appearance, marital status, personality)
Have you visited Slashdot.org with javascript on in Firefox recently? It stalls for a couple seconds while formatting those god awful tags.
I guess it's easier for Taco to wait for Firefox to get faster, instead of writing decent code to begin with.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It may also have something to do with firefox on windows being built with MSVC, which generally produces faster code than gcc...
I believe windows firefox is also compiled for i686 or even pentium3, whereas on linux it's typically compiled for i386.
What would be interesting to see, is optimized builds of firefox compiled with various compilers and options, i'm pretty sure a gentoo box with firefox compiled by intel's compiler could comfortably beat the windows binaries...
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I don't think a large amount of profile data will do much to improve optimization - better to have a lean profile that accurately represents the most used sections of the program.
Just wanted to point out that this is the advantage that Java and other runtime profiling languages have over purely statically compiled code. The more information you have the more you can do.
It's basically a compiler benchmark. What this proves is that the microsoft C++ compiler produces better code than gcc. This isn't suprising. Re-run the benchmark with the Linux code compiled with the intel compiler. gcc is a good compiler, but it doesn't produce code as tight as some commercial offerings.
WINE also goes through the entire horrible-ness of X and has the disadvantage that it has to translate the arcane GDI to X11.
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.
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
yes I've heard of gprof that's profiling not a profiling optimizer they are different things. Turns out the mozilla build system does support PGO with gcc though: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Building_with_Profile-Guided_Optimization . I'm not sure how it compares with the PGO in MSCC. I don't even know if the distros tend to build it with PGO. In any case gcc tends to lag behind commercial compilers in terms of performance (that is after all the selling point of commercial compilers). GCC tends to be ahead in terms of standards compliance.
I'd really rather go with sane & attractive. There's nothing wrong with a sweet but ditzy woman, especially if you can help supply brainpower as needed.