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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.'"
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-
Serious question: What is glibc doing that you don't think it should be doing?
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"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"-Sam&Max
>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.
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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.
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?
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Pick any two
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.
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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.
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.
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