The More Popular the Browser, the Slower It Is

demishade writes "Peacekeeper, the browser benchmark from the makers of 3DMark, comes out of beta and shows an interesting (though perhaps not surprising) tidbit — the more popular a browser, the worse its performance. While it should not be surprising to anyone that IE slugs at the last place, the gap between Firefox and Chrome, is. Once IE's market share goes the way of the Dodo will web developers start cursing Firefox? How long until Google comes out with a JavaScript intensive application that will practically require Chrome to function?"

Comments

First

[Anonymous Coward]

Here we are on the Slashdot plains in Africa, looking for that most elusive of species, the First Post...

Re:First

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, that was good for a first post ;)

Haven't seen that one before...

Re:First

[Da Cheez]

Hey, look at that. A first poster who I didn't actually want TO KILL ON SIGHT. You, sir, have earned a pardon (and a stern glare) for your deliberate misuse of being the first poster because your slightly humorous reference to nature documentaries almost (but not quite) brought a smile to my face. AC, I applaud you (though quietly, and with great hesitance)...

No surprise

[tedgyz]

Chrome was designed with JavaScript performance as a top goal. So why are we surprised it performs well?

Re:No surprise

[Philip K Dickhead]

My Firefox does 11 times more work than Chrome. The plugins I run are worth the minor tradeoffs in performance - because it's still speedy.

The value of NOT opening my robe to Google? Priceless!

Re:No surprise

[Spazztastic]

The value of NOT opening my robe to Google? Priceless!

I think I speak for us all when I say nobody wants you to open your robe to them.

Re:No surprise

[sapphire wyvern]

I installed SRWare Iron the other day. According to the publishers, it's basically a Chrome de-Googlified with a few other downstream tweaks (eg using a slightly newer version of WebKit). It seems to run all right, but I'm still typing this on Firefox because Adblock trumps Chrome/Iron's performance & user interface design advantages.

I *like* Chrome/Iron, and when it gets a decent extensibility model I think it'll tear a huge hole in Firefox's market share - but until then, it's going to be not much more than a cool tech demo.

Re:No surprise

[Smidge207]

The value of NOT opening my robe to Google? Priceless!

Dude, just open the kimono instead.

=Spludge=

Re:No surprise

[ionix5891]

I'm feeling lucky

Re:No surprise

[Jurily]

The value of NOT opening my robe to Google? Priceless!

Go ahead. At least they'll see the error of their ways.

Re:No surprise

[rackserverdeals]

Only thing slow today seems to be google. Is there some sort of Level 3 outage or something? I know Google News was down earlier in the Northeast but now it seems google video, youtube and search are affected as well.

Anyway... can we stop saying stupid crap like "Once IE's market share goes the way of the Dodo"?

Just because something is declining now that there is a serious competitor in the market place doesn't mean that the decline will go on at the same rate or indefinitely. Look at webserver trends.

Every time I hear stuff like that I just picture those little dogs that bark at big dogs.

Re:No surprise

[Ghostworks]

Sadly, half of the firefox plug-ins I now consider indispensable are the ones that disable functionality or return the user interface to an older style and functionality. Firefox was destined for bloat once they committed to building-in features that would have been more useful as pre-bundled, official extensions (like the anti-phishing technology).

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

I put on my robe and wizard hat...

Re:No surprise

[AKAImBatman]

Anyway... can we stop saying stupid crap like "Once IE's market share goes the way of the Dodo"?

Like it or not, IE is going the way of the Dodo. It's not market trends that are determining that, it's the fact that IE is an absolutely craptastic browser that the market has taken a dim view on. If anything, it has held up fairly well in the trends despite a growing disdain for its existence.

When every analyst in the market (short of those on the Microsoft payroll) is allied against you, you're not going to maintain a leading spot forever.

My personal expectation is that IE market share decline will accelerate over the next year rather than slow. i.e. The hockey stick effect tends to work both ways.

Re:No surprise

[commodore64_love]

Don't use plug-ins unless absolutely necessary. I just uninstalled a bunch of bloatware. One of those was NoScript because I felt it created more hassle than the advertising it blocked. Yes popups are annoying, but not as annoying as NoScript constantly disabling websites and me being forced to select "trusted site". It got to the point I was spending more time futzing-around with Noscript than with actually browsing the net.

Also I suspected NoScript of slowing down my computer as it gobbled more-and-more memory. Now the only plugins I use are a flash downloader for Youtube, and ImageZoom so I can see pics on Ebay more easily. That's it. And my broswer runs much better.

As for the article:

The conclusion is ridiculous because the sample size is too small. It's also ridiculous because those of use who remember the early 90s recall that Mosaic and Netscape Navigator were not only #1, but also extremely fast. QED the conclusion that a number one browser is slow.... is false.

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

google news was down this morning in the southeast. I seem to recall google being slow yesterday afternoon.

Re:No surprise

[AnalPerfume]

Would this be the same netcraft that gives the results corporations like Apple and Microsoft pay for? You may as well be quoting IDG or Gartner figures, it all amounts to the same.

Re:No surprise

[Qubit]

My Firefox does 11 times more work than Chrome.

Oh, I see. And most browsers go up to ten?

Exactly.

Does that mean it's better? Is it any better?

Well, it's one better, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be browsing along at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your browser. And it's like the SPAM is just pouring in from everywhere around and there's no way out. Where can you go from there? Where?

I don't know.

Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra boost of browser power, you know what we do?

Put it up to eleven.

Eleven. Exactly. One step better.

Re:No surprise

[rackserverdeals]

I basically only use IE as a preview tool when I'm developing websites so I'm not biased towards IE.

Dodos are extinct, as long as IE is installed by default in Windows, IE will not be extinct for a long time. Want to see what extinction of a web browser looks like?

When every analyst in the market (short of those on the Microsoft payroll) is allied against you, you're not going to maintain a leading spot forever.

Analysts don't determine what browser people use, they just try and predict it. If analysts are controlling the browser market it is through FUD and self fulfilling prophecy.

My personal expectation is that IE market share decline will accelerate over the next year rather than slow. i.e. The hockey stick effect tends to work both ways.

That's my point. There is no guarantee what is going to happen. It could get worse it could get better it could stay the same. Saying it with certainty just makes people look stupid.

Re:No surprise

[Philip K Dickhead]

Dear Nigel,

You had me at "11".

Re:No surprise

[JWSmythe]

>Only thing slow today seems to be google. Is there some sort of Level 3 outage or something?
>I know Google News was down earlier in the Northeast but now it seems google video, youtube
>and search are affected as well.

    I wasn't sure if it was just me or not. They're distributed enough where a single provider fault shouldn't make them unavailable. I'm guessing its something bigger in their infrastructure. Even gmail isn't working for me.

    I did a little looking, and it seems I'm unable to resolve their hostname on occasion. My nameservers are fine (I run mine, so I was able to verify), so it's something beyond there. Even when it resolves, it's slow as mud. Just loading the front of google.com, when it works, is pathetically slow. Oh well, it won't be my job on the line because of it. They never did decide to hire me.

   

Re:No surprise

[tnk1]

Let's be honest. Everyone wants IE to go the way of the Dodo, or at least improve to a level that it's worth the effort of running, but what determines how successful it is depends solely on the number of machines it is deployed on and available to.

As long as Microsoft is actively developing IE and Windows remains the top market share OS on the desktop, IE might decline somewhat, but its extinction is far from assured.

I mean, what is the top competitor? Firefox? Well, hell, I use Firefox every day, but the memory utilization of Firefox is disturbing to say the least. And I find that there are still times I still need to crack open IE to do something.

The best you can say about IE is that it might be at the beginning of a long decline into oblivion, but there's a lot that has to happen before that becomes anything like inevitable.

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

He is Dickhead... opening the robe does not show anything already visible...

Re:No surprise

[Chabo]

Well, there are rumors that IE8 is the last version before MS cancels it...

Re:No surprise

[rackserverdeals]

Would this be the same netcraft that gives the results corporations like Apple and Microsoft pay for? You may as well be quoting IDG or Gartner figures, it all amounts to the same.

Please have a clue next time you attempt to make pithy statement or have something to back it up.

Netcraft's webserver surveys are created by the data they collect spidering websites.

You're probably confusing them with Mind Craft which drew some flames for a benchmark back in 1999.

Re:No surprise

[nobodylocalhost]

You can use this if you want your privacy:
http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php

Personally, i use firefox for its plugins. adblock+, linkification, noscript, firebug, tamper data are the reason why i stick with firefox. If they were to be available in srware iron, i'd switch over in a heartbeat.

Re:No surprise

[AKAImBatman]

Dodos are extinct, as long as IE is installed by default in Windows, IE will not be extinct for a long time.

Netscape 4 was pre-installed on computers long after people stopped using it. Just because it's available doesn't mean it isn't effectively extinct. There's also the question of whether Microsoft will conceded defeat if their market share drops too low. It's perfectly possible that Triton will stop shipping with Windows. At least as an end-user browser. (It may be maintained as a legacy ActiveX control.)

Analysts don't determine what browser people use, they just try and predict it. If analysts are controlling the browser market it is through FUD and self fulfilling prophecy.

What is the purpose of prediction if it doesn't create a self-fulfilling prophecy? Analysts direct companies toward the solutions that make the most sense in the future market. Companies pay quite a bit of money to have an analyst tell them these things so they can be as competitive as possible. Most of it is absolute B.S. IMHO, and often gets companies into a lot of trouble. But that does not negate the very real effects these analyses have.

That's my point. There is no guarantee what is going to happen. It could get worse it could get better it could stay the same.

Everything is a probability. I can say with a high degree of confidence that I will be going to work tomorrow. Yet in reality, I could get a cold. Or a family emergency could develop. Or there could be a snow day in May tomorrow.

That last one has about the same probability as any of the current versions of Internet Explorer recovering market share.

Re:No surprise

[fprintf]

I thought the same way about NoScript until I read here on Slashdot about changing the settings to "allow for top level domains". Now 90% of the web works the way that it should and I am still somewhat protected against cross-linked scripts.

I must say I keep skipping the updates to NoScript since the dust-up with AdBlockPlus began. I'll stay on the old version that doesn't attempt to hijack my ABP settings, thankyouverymuch!

Re:No surprise

[squallbsr]

Last version before they cancel development on the Trident rendering engine...

My bet, IE9 will have both the Trident engine and the new whatever engine they have been working on (I'm lazy, go look it up yerself). This is to keep backwards compatibility with all those corporate Line Of Business apps.

Re:No surprise

[Sancho]

Microsoft won't stop shipping a browser with Windows. More likely (as the summary to that article suggests) they'll change the rendering engine to something that's not under their control (albeit almost certainly with their own tweaks.)

It really makes sense, at this point. There's really no good reason to reinvent the wheel every few years as they've been doing since IE6. It just serves to cause headache to web developers, it costs a lot of money, and it isn't really gaining them anything. If they switched to Webkit, they could cut most of the IE team, begin building a positive relationship with web developers, and *gasp* contribute back to the community by sending patches upstream. I'm sure they could figure out a way to write that off of their taxes.

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

I call BS I'm afraid. Sure, you may be too lazy to train NoScript, that's your choice. But cut the memory myth. How much RAM do you have? 2GB, 4GB? How close have you ever got to needing swap in the last three years?

Re:No surprise

[Kozz]

If you want to download a Youtube movie (MP4), create a Firefox bookmark on your toolbar with the following URL:

javascript:if(document.location.href.match(/http:\/\/[a-zA-Z\.]*youtube\.com\/watch/)){document.location.href='http://www.youtube.com/get_video?fmt='+(isHDAvailable?'22':'18')+'&video_id='+swfArgs['video_id']+'&t='+swfArgs['t']}

When you're on a Youtube page, click that bookmark button and voila! You don't need a flash downloader plugin. (Not until Youtube changes this ability, I suppose)

Re:No surprise

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

"The value of NOT opening my robe to Google? Priceless!"

Since Google pays for several Firefox developers, how do you know you are not opening your robe to google?
Have you reviewed the code?
You could be bending over for Google.

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

wat

Re:No surprise

[More_Cowbell]

I must say I keep skipping the updates to NoScript since the dust-up with AdBlockPlus began. I'll stay on the old version that doesn't attempt to hijack my ABP settings, thankyouverymuch!

They reverted that change almost immediately (with the next update). There was even a note of apology from the developer... you are safe to update.

Re:No surprise

[SonicRED]

and ImageZoom so I can see pics on Ebay more easily.

Liar.

Re:No surprise

[somersault]

Use Adblock to block ads, and noscript to block scripts. I used to have both, but as you say it ends up just being a pain navigating to a new site, wondering why something isn't working and then remembering about noscript (some poorly designed pages won't render at all without javascript..). but Adblock is enough for me by itself.

Re:No surprise

[NoName Studios]

There is YesScript though. Allows Javascript unless you click on the icon. Then it is disabled for that web site.

Re:No surprise

[Hijacked Public]

IE may or may not die off, but if I can project on the person you replied to a bit, the absolute last place anyone with any sense is going go for guidance on what technology the general public is going to prefer in the future, is Slashdot. There aren't likely many other sites where the readership and staff sport a better record of missing the boat so completely.

But that record does not seem to discourage some, they continue undaunted.

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyway... can we stop saying stupid crap like "Once IE's market share goes the way of the Dodo"?

So what would you prefer we say? "This browser is dead!"? "This is an ex-browser!"? "It's gone on to meet his maker!"? "It's joined the choir invisible!"? "If they hadn't nailed it to the OS, it'd be pushing up the daisies!"?

Re:No surprise

[Ken_g6]

I tried installing SRWare Iron a couple of months ago. I actually found it slower than Firefox with NoScript (and a bunch of other plugins). I suspect that, ignoring Javascript, Chromium is slower than Gecko on old, single-processor machines like mine.

Re:No surprise

[BrokenHalo]

Dodos are extinct

And, according to the record, dodos were like big heavyweight turkeys that never tasted too good in the first place, but they all got eaten anyway.

Whereas Internet Explorer is

Oh wait...

Re:No surprise

[uberbrodt]

Quite a bit of Firefox memory usage is in the caching mechanism. You can get that under control by following some of the tips here: http://gnoted.com/3-hacks-for-firefox-double-internet-browsing-speed/. Most of the article focuses on speed improvements, but if you modify the "browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer" setting, it will limit the amount of memory that firefox allocates for cache (the default is to use as much as it needs, based on available memory).

Re:No surprise

[bishiraver]

4GB. And I typically have a couple very large photoshop documents open, visual studio, firefox, and several other applications open.

The only thing that really pages is Photoshop...

Re:No surprise

[mini me]

From what I recall, people had to stop using Netscape 4 because many popular sites became IE-only (because of the prevalent use of ActiveX, among other things).

Re:No surprise

[AmiMoJo]

I think more likely is that IE moves to something like WebKit or at least drops support for all the non-standard and highly dangerous stuff like ActiveX (which most people don't need now Windows Update is an app).

MS no longer have such a strong influence over web technologies. Most web apps are based on frameworks now, and the frameworks are usually based on standards with a few hacks to fix IE. The days when web developers had to worry about browser support are fading.

Re:No surprise

[rackserverdeals]

People stopped using NN because it started to suck. It would crash on me multiple times a day.

There's also the question of whether Microsoft will conceded defeat if their market share drops too low.

There's also the question that the Mozilla foundation could disband in 2011 if their market share doesn't significantly increase and Google doesn't feel the money it's paying, that accounts for the majority of Mozilla's revenue, is worth it. Especially now that they have their own independent browser offering.

Analysts are notroriously wrong a large portion of the time You can also find plenty of examples on this site bashing stories where analysts decided a microsoft product was better/faster/cheaper/more secure than an open source solution. Don't be a hypocrite and rely on analyst opinion only when it aligns with your views.

It's one thing to speculate, it's another thing to come across like a FUD campaign that rivals the big boys. Or optimistic vs dellussional.

Re:No surprise

[AmiMoJo]

That's an oversimplification. Different add-ons perform differently. Seems obvious but apparently a lot of people don't realise it.

AdBlock+, for example, makes the browser faster in many cases by removing crap that would otherwise slow it down. FlashBlock is the same. Sure, they add some tiny delay as they scan the loaded page, but it's nothing compared to the delay produced by having to download and render the stuff remove.

Other add-ons have barely any effect at all since they can be turned off most of the time (e.g. Rikaichan, a godsend for anyone learning Japanese or Chinese, or CSS editors etc) or have a very minimal impact to the initial loading time as they just add a few items to a menu or a taskbar icon.

The parent clearly has no idea - he thinks NoScript is using lots of memory. All NoScript does is provide a handy icon to change the built-in Javascript preferences. How much does one icon and a bit of chrome slow your system down?

Re:No surprise

[CSMatt]

NoScript is the only way I can browse Slashdot without slowing my browser to a crawl.

Re:No surprise

[Lars T.]

The value of NOT opening my robe to Google? Priceless!

I think I speak for us all when I say nobody wants you to open your robe to them.

Even if, we'd have to GFI.

Re:No surprise

[Kugrian]

I open your robe and wheeze at that.

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

You insensitive clod, that was my cat!

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

With extensions you have made a choice what you want on your system and what you find necessary. So you don't like NoScript any more, you remove it.
But how do I remove the new super great awesome awesome bar, that grows my places.sqlite to 84MB (114 megs on another profile) and thrashes my hard drive for 10 seconds when I type something in or open the history?
And Firefox2 isn't in the Ubuntu repo any more :/

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

11? That's ridiculous. It's not even funny.

Re:No surprise

[The End Of Days]

Slashdotters, as a group, have a complete inability to take an objective look at things. Everyone is too busy believing that world would be perfect if only everyone thought the way they did. That attitude gives you tremendous blind spots when dealing with reality.

Re:No surprise

[jc42]

NoScript is the only way I can browse Slashdot without slowing my browser to a crawl.

Yes, it helps a lot. But there are other reasons for wanting to block scripts. I have a few demos of some nasty things that can be done to you using javascript, and I've seen several demos of others online. Anyone have links to their favorite ways of exploiting users who enable JS?

--
I now demand that my user page be restored to its former layout.

I keep thinking that we need a forum to discuss slashdot, but I've never seen one. It'd be especially handy if there were a place that readers could ask dumb n00b questions about how things work here. It's gotten far too complex for my little brain, and I suspect this is true for others.

Last week, I had a pleasant surprise when most of the boilerplate on the main /. page disappeared, and all I got was the articles. No wide columns of white space, text from left edge to right edge. With the window only 1/3 the width of this 1920x1200 screen, I could read 4 or 5 summaries without scrolling. Then on Monday, it reverted. Now I have to make the window full screen to see all of the first two summaries without scrolling. At 1/3 the screen width, I see only one summary, with those wide mostly-blank columns on the left and right.

Anyway, it looks like the code has a way of generating the format that I like. But I have no idea how to tell it to send me that format. Anyone know? And, to be more general, is there some place that (if I only knew about it), I could have asked this question and got a friendly answer from someone who has already stumbled across the secret?

(Yes, I sent a question to AskSlashdot. It disappeared without a trace. ;-)

Re:No surprise

[SQLGuru]

I stopped using Netscape when they bolted all of that "crap" on to it. Sure, the news/mail/editor/etc. were decent, but I wanted a BROWSER, not a Communicator.

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

How is the parent a troll?

Re:No surprise

[Mister Whirly]

It's not your job to be as confused as Nigel then, is it?

All I know is my Firefox plays things in Doubly.

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome was designed with JavaScript performance as a top goal. So why are we surprised it performs well?

I think you mean "Safari was designed..." Chrome is a WebKit browser.

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

cool :D

but does anyone know why there is much more noise in mplayer than in flash player on youtube? I tested that javascript and it works just fine, but noise level in downloaded mp4 is almost unbearable

Re:No surprise

[tedgyz]

Uh, no. I'm not eager to use a hip browser to go along with my jesus phone and elitist computer. Sorry Steve Jobs, you can keep your browser.

I read about chrome in wired, where they clearly stated this as a design goal. Does a WebKit browser preclude performance? Are you turned off by an open API to make development easier?

Re:No surprise

[Toonol]

I am in the exact same boat. It's to the point where I am keeping an eye out for a lighter, faster, stripped down fork of Firefox. Sigh... I guess that's how software evolves; very similar to governments, but on a 5 year scale instead of two centuries.

I still push Firefox in place of IE whenever I can, but without as much passion.

Re:No surprise

[EvilBudMan]

Yeah, I have extensions out the wazoo. Even with memory leaks and all. One is a must have; "Ad Block Plus". Tabbed browsing and lack of spyware problems that we with IE6 caused me to switch everyone over. No one even noticed. But man now there is a lot of plugins I take for granted. Outlook and Firefox don't play as nice together as IE8 and Outlook. I get memory leaks fro one or the other eventually.

Re:No surprise

[truthsearch]

I keep thinking that we need a forum to discuss slashdot, but I've never seen one.

When I created Seen on Slash a few years ago I thought the forum might become a place for slashdotters to discuss slashdot. We get some decent traffic to the rest of the site, but the forums never caught on.

Re:No surprise

[jc42]

Well, I for one had never heard of Seen on Slash until now, so maybe that's part of the explanation. I'll look it over.

Re:No surprise

[AKAImBatman]

People stopped using NN because it started to suck. It would crash on me multiple times a day.

And people have stopped using Internet Explorer because it has started to suck. It's the vector for a number of viruses and it does a poor job rendering many websites. What's your point?

If people stop using IE completely, it will be extinct regardless of whether or not Microsoft ships it.

Analysts are notroriously wrong a large portion of the time

Doesn't matter. They still determine the course of much of the market. Those analyses combined with the existing market forces to move toward webapps with greater sophistication leaves Microsoft's Trident engine poorly positioned to compete. Its market share will continue to dwindle. The probability of anything else happening are extremely poor; barring major corrective action by Microsoft.

There's also the question that the Mozilla foundation could disband in 2011 if their market share doesn't significantly increase and Google doesn't feel the money it's paying, that accounts for the majority of Mozilla's revenue, is worth it. Especially now that they have their own independent browser offering.

Disbanding Mozilla would appear to be a low probability at this time. Google stopping payments is a medium risk, which is why Mozilla is looking for alternative income sources.

Microsoft having to do something about Trident in the future is an extremely high probability. They have already indicated that shipping an alternative engine is an option they are considering. Based on their previous behavior, Microsoft isn't likely to continue to push a dead product. They will move on and find other ways to fight the market.

It's one thing to speculate, it's another thing to come across like a FUD campaign that rivals the big boys. Or optimistic vs dellussional.

I agree. Stop being so optimistic about IE's chances and spreading FUD that IE is still a viable platform. Everything in the market suggests that Microsoft's chances are nil at this point. To think otherwise is either hopelessly optimistic and/or delusional.

Re:No surprise

[mdm-adph]

I hope I played some _small_ part of that -- I've been repeating the mantra of "allow for top level domains" in NoScript for a while now. It's works so simple when you set it like that, I wonder why it's not set that way by default.

Re:No surprise

[rgviza]

I bless you with Cure Disease to fix your wheezing.

Re:No surprise

[Jack9]

All NoScript does is provide a handy icon to change the built-in Javascript preferences.

Implementation is everything. From a theoretical point of view "change the built-in Javascript preferences" could be horrendously slow via a recursive processing of the page or something similarly time or process intensive. I would expect NoScript is better than that, but not all plugins are.
 

Re:No surprise

[cyborch]

Most likely what you saw was the mobilesafari site. I have no good reason why it would appear to you in your normal browser except if it was a bug which occurred once while they introduced the new iphone version of their site. I recommend you try setting your browser string to

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3

to get the results you described.

Re:No surprise

[gparent]

He must've changed his mind, because blocking the Ads on the author's page (using a custom filter with right-click add) does not work with latest versions of NoScript and AdBlockPlus here.

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

You evidently don't live in Minnesota.

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes popups are annoying, but not as annoying as NoScript constantly disabling websites and me being forced to select "trusted site".

Um... that's what NoScript is INTENDED to do. Of course, if it interferes with your browsing, uninstalling NoScript again is the right thing to do, but what exactly are you complaining about? That it's doing the job it was intended to do?

Re:No surprise

[CSMatt]

Try switching on "Low bandwidth" in the general index preferences page.

Re:No surprise

[VGPowerlord]

That works great... if Youtube is the only site you use a flash downloader on.

Which it isn't in my case.

Re:No surprise

[BikeHelmet]

I remember trying SRWare Iron a while back. As soon as I typed something into the address bar, it popped up an advertisement. :/

Back to Firefox!

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

or just change the URL from youtube.com/blah to pwnyoutube.com/blah

Re:No surprise

[amRadioHed]

I use "Chinese Pera-Kun", it's extremely useful. Rikaichan doesn't say anything about Chinese on their website, only Japanese, German, French, and Russian. Is there Chinese support for it as well?

Re:No surprise

[andol221]

I also use SRWare Iron and it is possible to get some sort of AdBlock in Iron. Save this file in the SRWare Iron program folder and the anoying ads are a thing of the past. http://www.srware.net/downloads/adblock.ini It's not as easily tweaked as AdBlok in FF but it's a start.

Re:No surprise

[AmiMoJo]

It's no where near as complex as you seem to think it is.

Firefox has built in preferences for Javascript. You can turn it on or off. You can also set up a list of domains which have their own on/off setting, but there is no built-in user interface for that.

If it's on, it's on as normal. If it's off, the anything in the tags is ignored. Simple as that. The only performance hit is for scanning the list of domains which have their own on/off settings, but even with hundreds of them it's almost negligible, in the milliseconds range.

Re:No surprise

[KC7JHO]

Not quite "exposing yourself to art" is it?

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm the complexity of websites was nil compared to today. So your conclusion that number one browser is slow = false seems like a reach.

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Or just use
www.keepvid.com

Re:No surprise

[More_Cowbell]

Not sure I believe you... Because I just tried and it works fine.
Also, I'm not sure that you are talking about the same thing. From the changelog :: http://noscript.net/changelog (IIRC, these were just a few days apart).

v 1.9.2.3

+ A "NoScript development support filterset" gets added to AdBlock
Plus, whitelisting the noscript.net, flashgot.net, informaction.com
and hackademix.net web sites recently broken by an aggressive
EasyList campaign against sites sponsoring NoScript development.
ABP users are informed both on the install and on the release notes
pages, so they can easily disable the filterset if they whish to.

v 1.9.2.5

+ One-time startup prompt to ask users *beforehand* if they want to
install/keep or permanently delete the AdBlock Plus "NoScript
Development Support Filterset" deployed with NoScript 1.9.2.3
and above

v 1.9.2.6

+ NoScript now automatically removes the controversial "NoScript
Development Support Filterset" deployed with NoScript 1.9.2.3 and
above on startup, permanently and with no questions asked.

This is aside from the fact that I only see a couple tiny squares of ads on the page - nothing flashy or obtrusive. And I may be wrong, but I believe you can adjust in the settings somewhere so the noscript page does not even come up with each update... never tried because I like reading what was changed.

Cheers.

Re:No surprise

[uniquename72]

It's such a fine line between stupid and clever...

Re:No surprise

[Mozk]

Matching every link and reference on a page against a 31 KB file of over 2000 strings? No thank you. My AdBlock list was about 20 lines long, but now NoScript pretty much solves everything.

By the way, .*ad.* will match over half of that list (assuming regexes are valid). Then just whitelist words with ad that you don't want blocked, like admonition, barricade, etc., which you could also probably do in one line of regex.

Re:No surprise

[rackserverdeals]

God I hope you're a paid shill, think you're helping the cause or this is some joke and you don't really believe the crap you're saying.

Re:No surprise

[fractoid]

My Firefox does 11 times more work than Chrome. The plugins I run are worth the minor tradeoffs in performance - because it's still speedy.

Exactly. This is one of those 'correlation that does not imply causation' things. The most popular browsers are the fullest featured, most stable, most complete browsers. Being full-featured, stable and complete generally comes at a performance cost.

Re:No surprise

[definate]

No AdBlock?

How do you manage to function without AdBlock?

It has been years since I've seen a large amount of ads, than when I first used Chrome, I almost didn't recognize the sites I go to, since most of them were formatted slightly differently and had loads of flashing things.

AdBlock plus is essential for me to function on the internet.

I tried using it without it, but my tolerance for ignoring flashing things and adverts has decreased so far, that I'm never going back.

Once Chrome has this, I can certainly see myself using that all the time. For now, I use Chrome as my "secure" browser... basically a browser which only goes to trusted sites without heaps of advertising, gmail, gcal, online bank, etc.

Re:No surprise

[definate]

That's right. That's - that's good. That's good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6-Minute Abs. Then you're in trouble, huh?

Re:No surprise

[definate]

I found Iron to be a lot more buggy and run a lot slower than Chrome. Perhaps when it becomes more mature it will be good, but it worked terribly for me.

Re:No surprise

[Philip K Dickhead]

But IETab with IE8 fixes problems with sites that are inaccessible to IE8. :-) It did the same for IE7.

As my corp machine has IE8, I find IETab (in my Portable Firefox) indispensable.

Re:No surprise

[Philip K Dickhead]

Guards! There's a FLASHER in the Expressionist exhibition!

Re:No surprise

[muckracer]

> NoScript is the only way I can browse Slashdot without slowing my browser to a crawl.

Slashdot is indeed one of the slowest sites. Liked the old interface a lot more...speedier. What settings did you choose and what domains allowed?

Offtopic: Anyone know, how to read /. offline as in downloading or at least browser-loading the *entire* discussion thread on a given story? Would like to use my time on the train commute.

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not just browse at 10 and clean up your code and make 10 a little faster?

Re:No surprise

[MadKeithV]

Did you put on your robe and wizard hat again?

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with Epiphany? It uses the Gecko engine, supports essential extensions like AdBlock and GreaseMonkey, and it has one very useful thing Firefox doesn't: the "Actions" extension, which allows you to execute arbitrary commands on pages. The potential for this nearly unlimited.

Most importantly, unlike Firefox, it doesn't slow down my box to a crawl. Since I've found Epiphany, I use Firefox only for building/debugging.

Re:No surprise

[AmiMoJo]

It surprises me that there are not open source community builds of Chrome.

While I'm 99% sure that SRWare are probably good guys it's still difficult for me to trust anything that isn't reviewed by other programmers not associated with them. Sure, I could do it myself, but why waste hours of my life to save 1 second when opening a web page?

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Epiphany

Re:No surprise

[jonadab]

> People stopped using NN because it started to suck. It would crash on me multiple times a day.

I noticed that too. Pegasus Mail suddenly started crashing a lot too, seemingly at random. And then I uninstalled ICQ, and suddenly Pegasus stopped crashing, and Netscape went back to its former crash rate of a couple of times a day. (This was on Windows 95 OSR2, so, no memory protection.)

And I know the browser crashing a couple of times a day sounds like excruciating pain now, but this was 1998; there was no such thing as a browser that could go all day without crashing.

Re:No surprise

[commodore64_love]

No.

That was the truth.

It just wasn't the WHOLE truth (like a Minbari).

"A lie?" - Kirstie Alley. "An omission." - Leonard Nimoy

Re:No surprise

[commodore64_love]

I guess I consider the ads on the net to be identical to the ads on TV. It's the price you pay for getting free entertainment, and I think that's better than if there were no ads and we had to pay a ~$300 subscription for each of the NBC, FOX, CW, et cetera channels. (~$300 is how much BBC-UK charges for their ad-free network.) Multiply by the 5 major nets and you've got a $1500 annual bill.

Ouch. I'd rather take the ads and get those networks for free. Same applies to the free websites.

Re:No surprise

[commodore64_love]

NoScript has that same option, but it's not logical because if you've already visited the site with Javascript turned-on, then you've already been attacked by the malicious software.

Re:No surprise

[rackserverdeals]

And I know the browser crashing a couple of times a day sounds like excruciating pain now, but this was 1998; there was no such thing as a browser that could go all day without crashing.

Around 1998 is when I switched to IE (before FF came out) and it could go days without crashing.

Re:No surprise

[AKAImBatman]

Considering that I'm not for any particular browser, analyst, or other specific entity, I find your claim of being a "paid shill" to be as bizarre as it hilarious.

I could return the compliment based on your arguments in favor of Microsoft, but you're simply not well spoken enough to be on anyone's payroll. (Especially not Microsoft's. From the Microsoft employees I've publicly spoken with, they are masters at projecting a particular image while skirting around the core of the issue.)

Re:No surprise

[Philip K Dickhead]

I told you! I'm a Sorcerer! Wizards are sissies!

Re:No surprise

[rackserverdeals]

I could return the compliment based on your arguments in favor of Microsoft

I'm not making arguments in favor of Microsoft, I'm making arguments in favor of IE not dieing which you don't seem to understand. It doesn't mean I'm trying to promote IE. I barely use it myself.

I don't drink starbucks coffee. I think it tastes like crap and is too expensive. I think the economic conditions are going to hurt them and they are likely to close more stores as a result. That doesn't mean I think they're going to completely disappear off the face of the planet, even if I think that wouldn't be such a bad thing.

The difference is you're coming across like a fanatic with unjustifiable predictions and it's that kind of crazy attitude that is prevalent in a lot of open source communities that undermines its acceptance. People should take a cue from the Apache foundation. They're probably the biggest reason open source software has spread and they don't go around sounding like uneducated prima donnas.

Re:No surprise

[jc42]

Well, I tried that, and it seemed to work ok with slashdot (though it only gave me 3 or 4 summaries at a time rather than the much larger number that I have configured in my preferences.

But then I switched to the window in which I have gmail, refreshed it - and it was a disaster. Google's gmail code does something that makes it limit the portion of the screen to a small rectangle at the upper left, with a huge font size. No matter how you resize the window, the rest of the window simply isn't used, and you can only read a tiny portion of a single message at a time.

So I reverted to to the previous "Firefox/3.0.10", which fixed gmail, and unfixed slashdot so the main page now only uses about1/3 of the window's width for summaries, and the rest is mostly blank except for a bit of stuff at the top that I don't use.

Making slashdot merely an annoying waste of screen space is better than making gmail unusable.

Re:No surprise

[jc42]

I poked around a couple of times, and I remember seeing a setting for network bandwidth, but I couldn't find it. I did find the "General" thingy in the "Advanced" window, and looked through all the stuff there several times, but I couldn't find anything that talks about bandwidth. I also looked in the "about:config" stuff for "bandwidth", but it doesn't even find "band". I guessed other things like "width" and "speed", and they don't match anything, either.

This is on a Macbook Pro, with firefox 3.0.10. I wonder where the network speed setting might be hidden.

Mosaic

[Evelas]

So does this mean that Mosaic is the most efficient one out there?

Re:Mosaic

[bishiraver]

No - Lynx is!

Re:Mosaic

[JanneM]

So does this mean that Mosaic is the most efficient one out there?

I'm willing to entertain the notion that yes, it would be extremely fast if you got it running on modern hardware. It wouldn't do much of course, but what little it did would probably be faster than any current browser.

Re:Mosaic

[1shooter]

No. It means lynx is.

Re:Mosaic

[Tikkun]

I prefer elinks. There is a slight tradeoff in performance from lynx, but it is much more usable.

Re:Mosaic

[eln]

You're missing the point. The moral of the story is that if you make a browser that takes an average of 3 days to render a page and locks up the entire computer while doing it, it will be the most popular browser around!

Re:Mosaic

[geekoid]

Nope.

Sitting in front of my computer imagining webpages is even faster.

And probably better then using lynx

Re:Mosaic

[marcosdumay]

Elinks also has a lot more users.

Re:Mosaic

[James Skarzinskas]

Telnet's here, boys. What say you now?

Re:Mosaic

[Chabo]

Links > Lynx

Re:Mosaic

[pmike_bauer]

No, telnet to port 80

Kids these days...can't use their imagination.

Re:Mosaic

[NevarMore]

Telnet's here, boys. What say you now?

netcat

Re:Mosaic

[strstrep]

Actually, you would probably find Mosaic fairly slow these days, on the pages that would render acceptably. Mosaic had a poor threading model for the type of pages that you see today.

Re:Mosaic

[debiansid]

I say go sit in the corner and watch me zip through the intertubes. I'm netcat ;)

Re:Mosaic

[tool462]

Time to fire up some gopher!

Re:Mosaic

[bennomatic]

I could gopher that!

Re:Mosaic

[JWSmythe]

    Aw, come on. Most of 'em don't know that you can talk to a lot of things with telnet. I've amazed people by connecting for HTTP, POP3, and IMAP using just telnet. You should see them when I send them an email, to them, from them, through their own mail server. I always get a "you can't do that!", which I always follow by "check your mail, and tell me that again."

    {sigh}

    It's not rocket science. It's even documented in the RFC's. Then again, most people on the Internet have never heard of an RFC, and glaze over when you start explaining it to them. At least they know how to clickie their way through putting enough bling on their MySpace page to blind almost anyone, or give epileptics seizures.

    I actually had an interview at a big hosting company for a SysAdmin position, where they asked "How would you verify a site is working?". I responded "First whois hostname to make sure we're authoritative. Then nslookup hostname to make sure the ip is right. Then telnet hostname 80 GET / HTTP/1.0[enter][enter]. Then test in a browser to make sure the content is right." They looked at me, then each other to figure out if I was right, and then with a surprised look said "ok", and continued with the questioning. I guess they had a different way, like firing up a web browser and checking there. My way verifies the whole way through, but hey, they weren't looking for the best answer, they were looking for their answer, which I failed to give.

    My answer to "How do you gain access to a MySQL database, if all of the passwords have been forgotten?" wasn't exactly what they expected either. That's when they started taking notes on my answers, and the questions went from interviewing to asking me for their own knowledge.

    They tried to put me in the call center though, instead of only fielding hardcore admin questions. I'm too old and grumpy to be warm and friendly on stupid support calls. I'd only make it a few hours before I went ballistic on the 100th caller who said "My interwebs ain't working."

Re:Mosaic

[King_TJ]

Bah.... IBM WebExplorer, FTW!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_WebExplorer

Re:Mosaic

[kkrajewski]

Psht, I call up a dial-up ISP and whistle into the phone handset really fast.

Re:Mosaic

[sgtrock]

[groan] You've been waiting 20 years to use that, haven't you? lol

Re:Mosaic

[mdarksbane]

I thought Netscape already did that. At least that's how it felt on the old school celerons.

Re:Mosaic

[fm6]

Lynx is pure bloat with its silly "hyperlinks". I use wget!

Re:Mosaic

[definate]

Telnet doesn't work very well, you have to type everything in. You need an interface which allows you and other people, to navigate easier. Might I suggest running a BBS?

Re:Mosaic

[Lunzo]

BOFH is that you?

Re:Mosaic

[jonadab]

> Sitting in front of my computer imagining webpages is even faster.

You have a computer? All I've got is a piece of dark grey slate. Works great.

What do I need a computer for? Confounded new-fangled gadgets...

Re:Mosaic

[jonadab]

Telnet? Bah. I control the network connection by flipping switches on the front panel.

Re:Mosaic

[jonadab]

> You should see them when I send them an email, to them, from them, through their own mail server.

Don't forget to Cc their boss, just for the extra fun of it.

And yeah, I had to telnet into port 80 just a few weeks ago to verify that the proxy was returning an HTTP/1.0 response whereas the site itself was returning an HTTP/1.1 response. (Eventually Symantec issued a fix, presumably because upgrading every proxy on the planet isn't feasible on the right kind of timescale and people needed to get LiveUpdate working right away.)

> "How do you gain access to a MySQL database, if all of the passwords have been forgotten?"

Seriously?

Okay, I guess the first thing you do is fire the database administrator and his boss...

Re:Mosaic

[JWSmythe]

    I get that a lot. But lets walk into the server room and I can tell you all about it. You go first, I have to grab something from my desk.

    [door slams shut]

    [electronic deadbolts engage]

    "Hey, what's going on?"

    "Oh, don't worry, it's just the automated security system. I forgot to disable it. Gimme one second."

    "Hey, the lights just went off!"

    "Don't worry. Do you see the red exit light across the room there?"

    "ya"

    "Just go to that door, it's unlocked."

    "WHAAA!"

    There's a soft thud as Lunzo falls through the missing raised floor panel, down a strangely located chute, and into the waiting garbage compactor outside.

    "Oh, and be careful of the hole. We've been meaning to fix that."

    Hmmm, did the red button start the compactor, or unlock the doors? Only one way to find out.

    "WHAAAA!"

    [crunching sounds]

    I would think people would learn not to ask so many questions. Then again, witnesses are a liability.

chrome experiments

[darkvad0r]

How long until Google comes out with a JavaScript intensive application that will practically require Chrome to function? It already exists, in the form of http://www.chromeexperiments.com/

Re:chrome experiments

[afidel]

Uh, almost all of them work just fine in Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 on my ancient Thinkpad T42. Monster's animation speed was about the same but had slightly more frequent pauses in Firefox, since the code is optimized for Chrome and not for Firefox that's not too bad a result for Firefox.

So to make your browser a real success...

[bostei2008]

be really really wicked slow.

Re:So to make your browser a real success...

[telchine]

be really really wicked slow.

correlation != causation

Re:So to make your browser a real success...

[Anonymous Coward]

assert(you->understandsHumor() == false);

Re:So to make your browser a real success...

[bostei2008]

be really really wicked slow.

correlation != causation

that was sarcasm...

Re:So to make your browser a real success...

[Debug0x2a]

Because clearly I like spaghetti because my house is made of bricks.

Re:So to make your browser a real success...

[Eudial]

Problem is, it's not even given there is a correlation. The sample size isn't terribly large to begin with. By only looking at the top browsers, they're selecting away lots of outliers that may or may not have terrible performance.

And they produce no statistical analysis of how strong the correlation is.

G1 browser

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still astounded by how unstable and slow Google's G1 browser is. It's the main reason I haven't looked at Chrome yet.

Re:G1 browser

[Zapotek]

I'm still astounded by how unstable and slow Google's Android browser is. It's the main reason I haven't looked at Chrome yet.

There, fixed that for ya, come again...

Re:G1 browser

[youngdev]

I'm still astounded by how unstable and slow Google's Android Network is. It's the main reason I haven't looked at Chrome yet.

fixed that for you

Causation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe we're getting the causation reversed. The slower the browser, the more popular it is.

Not so surprising

[AKAImBatman]

Once IE's market share goes the way of the Dodo will web developers start cursing Firefox?

Do the words "TraceMonkey" mean anything to the authors? It's the core Javascript engine of the upcoming revision of Firefox. And it is fast. Some benchmarks suggest that it is highly competitive with V8 (Chrome) and SquirrelFish (Safari).

(Speaking of which, isn't it a bit disingenous to compare Safari 4 BETA to the current version of Firefox? Why not compare the Firefox beta then? Smells of yeller-bellied journalism to me.)

Javascript is currently a hugely competitive area. Every browser revision is trying to boost performance. (Including Microsoft.) It only makes sense that the older and cruftier engines would have a harder time competing with the newer and more nimble engines created by these upstart competitors. However, with the exception of Microsoft who's stuck updating JScript (haha, bundle FAIL!), all the other competitors can and are swapping out engines for faster and faster performance.

Re:Not so surprising

[geekoid]

So they didn't evaluate something with a feature it doesn't ahve yet.

Hay, they should ahve run them on the yet to be released 5Ghz 64Gig machine.

Re:Not so surprising

[Shin-LaC]

(Speaking of which, isn't it a bit disingenous to compare Safari 4 BETA to the current version of Firefox? Why not compare the Firefox beta then? Smells of yeller-bellied journalism to me.)

It could be that most of their Safari visitors are using the beta, while most of their Firefox visitors are using a release version. Since they're trying to correlate a browser's market share with its performance, it would make some sense to choose the most common version of each contender.

Disclaimer: I am not saying this is the case, just offering it as a possible explanation.

Re:Not so surprising

[xZgf6xHx2uhoAj9D]

They were testing popular browsers. Safari beta is popular. Firefox beta is unpopular.

Re:Not so surprising

[AKAImBatman]

Whachoo talkn'bout Willis?

They compared Safari 4 Beta. Why is asking for them to test Firefox 3.5 beta such a stretch?

Re:Not so surprising

[AKAImBatman]

It could be that most of their Safari visitors are using the beta, while most of their Firefox visitors are using a release version.

So FutureMark is telling us that the number of Safari 4 users who have explicitly downloaded the beta upgrade, significantly outnumber the Safari 3 users who got it bundled, managed, and updated with their Operating System?

If this was IE vs. another browser, I could see that being the case. But since we're talking about a beta revision of the same browser, I find that statement highly suspect.

Re:Not so surprising

[Endo13]

Um... they did include Firefox 3.5B in the test.

Re:Not so surprising

[SlashDotDotDot]

(Speaking of which, isn't it a bit disingenous to compare Safari 4 BETA to the current version of Firefox? Why not compare the Firefox beta then? Smells of yeller-bellied journalism to me.)

The press release may be a bit unfair. But the other link (http://service.futuremark.com/peacekeeper/browserStatistics.action) does compare FF 3.5 (beta 4). It ranks 4th, behind the Safari beta, Chrome2 beta and Chrome1 release.

Re:Not so surprising

[Halo1]

Do the words "TraceMonkey" mean anything to the authors? It's the core Javascript engine of the upcoming revision of Firefox. And it is fast. Some benchmarks suggest that it is highly competitive with V8 (Chrome) and SquirrelFish (Safari).

(Speaking of which, isn't it a bit disingenous to compare Safari 4 BETA to the current version of Firefox? Why not compare the Firefox beta then?

They did, the results are in the article linked under "gap between Firefox and Chrome".

Re:Not so surprising

[AKAImBatman]

Since when does 3.0.10 == 3.5 Beta?

FTFA:

Table: Browser performance and popularity in Peacekeeper (beta)

Browser Version Peacekeeper Score* Visitors to Futuremark
Safari 4.0 Beta 1222 0.8%
Chrome 1.0.154.49 874 3.7%
Opera 9.64 463 6.3%
Firefox 3.0.10 397 31.5%
Internet Explorer 8.0 280 57.3%

Re:Not so surprising

[jellomizer]

Well here are some simple reasons for this trend.

1. The more popular the browser the more well established the code is trend. Meaning Popular Browsers are older thus have an older code base. And because it is popular you are more careful not to break anything.

2. Popular Browsers have more safeguards and checks. IE runs a ton of Broken Code, hence why it loads up so much junk and renders it OK. Firefox does a middle ground at this. The less popular browsers the more it follows the stricter standard creating it to load faster as it has less checks.

3.Popular Browsers have more features which can slow it down
 

Re:Not so surprising

[TikiTDO]

While they did include 3.5b4, the results require a bit of browsing on your part. You can find them on the Peacekeeper Statistics Page.

Re:Not so surprising

[AKAImBatman]

That's fair, at least. I ran SunSpider for comparison, and I found their full benchmarks are much closer to the real world values. i.e. There's about a 20% performance difference between FF3.5b4 and Chrome 1.0.154.59 and a ~50% performance difference between FF3.5b4 and Safari 4 Beta. Which is far more competitive than the rather massive 300% performance gap between FF3 and Safari 4 Beta. (aka Yellow Journalism)

Re:Not so surprising

[Dak RIT]

The actual Peacekeeper web site had data for all the browsers, including betas for Firefox (3.5) and Chrome (2.0). Safari 4 was still the fastest, with Chrome 2 and 1 coming in 2nd and 3rd respectively.

Re:Not so surprising

[tlhIngan]

Javascript is currently a hugely competitive area. Every browser revision is trying to boost performance. (Including Microsoft.) It only makes sense that the older and cruftier engines would have a harder time competing with the newer and more nimble engines created by these upstart competitors. However, with the exception of Microsoft who's stuck updating JScript (haha, bundle FAIL!), all the other competitors can and are swapping out engines for faster and faster performance.

I wonder if it's caused by web developers trying fancy new things, or by faster browsers causing web developers to try fancy new things that bog everything down again?

Take eBay's "new improved search experience" that's all web-2.0 buzzword compliant. The old experience was a lot faster for me (rendering, interaction, memory usage, responsiveness), but the new crap is just... a pig. (I suspect this is the reason why eBay.com moved the date when it was forced from April to June, but other eBay sites internationally don't have that luxury).

It's so bad, I can browse eBay and find Firefox running out of memory! (As in, it soon consumes 2GB of virtual memory).

I don't blame firefox, I blame all this flashy must-have-web-2.0-crap.

Re:Not so surprising

[Attila Dimedici]

0.8% is popular?

Re:Not so surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Because with safari, the term "beta" just means "we're planning to sneak a couple extra features in with OS X 10.6, so we can't tell you it's done".

There's a big difference between the development cycle of safari and firefox.

The FF team sets big milestones and does lots of complicated changes between major releases, which inevitably introduces bugs.

Meanwhile the safari team hardly ever even touches the rendering engine, and just focus on the GUI. They leave the hard work to the WebKit team, which has thousands of people running *nightly builds for everyday surfing* and fixes any bugs that crop up very fast. If a change causes bugs in WebKit, that code is either fixed or deleted right away.

"Safari 4 beta" is just a fancy new chrome-inspired user interface on top of a slightly newer (and by now months old) snapshot of the WebKit engine. Not a major new release like firefox 3.5.

Why isn't the webkit nightly build in that bench test? It's tons faster than both safari 4 and chrome.

Re:Not so surprising

[slyn]

It appears you and anyone who modded you read only one of TFA's.

http://service.futuremark.com/peacekeeper/browserStatistics.action

That one puts Firefox 3.0.10 right around where Opera 9.64 is, and Firefox 3.5 right around where Safari 3.2.2 is. Chrome live, Chrome beta, and Safari 4 beta trounce all of the rest.

Re:Not so surprising

[AKAImBatman]

While the generic benchmarks have ALL browsers listed, the article that made the claim about popularity was the one with the table. And that table is comparing apples to apricots.

It's easy to make bizarre claims when you're rigging the data.

Re:Not so surprising

[cowdung]

I don't agree. I think the issue here is that more popular browsers have TOO MANY FEATURES. That is what is making Firefox unbearably slow and fat, and the same w/IE.

I liked Firefox in the old days when it was a light weight Mozilla. Now it's just a hog.

Regards,

A Chrome user

Re:Not so surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does everyone think that Javascript is the only measure of speed? If your Javascript engine is ridiculously fast, but your browser UI architecture is too heavy-weight and stuff can't fly around as fast as the Javascript can request it to, then speeding up you JS engine isn't the thing you need to do.

XUL is why Firefox sucks. I thought it was mostly just shitty on Linux because nobody at Mozilla cares about Linux anymore, but I've been using it on Win32 some and it's unstable and slowish (but mostly just unstable) there too.

Chrome is crazy fast, but I think the JS engine is not the only reason.

Re:Not so surprising

[Lars T.]

Just do the test yourself - others did it, so (spoiler-warning) you will probably be disappointed.

Re:Not so surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Just do the test yourself - others did it, so (spoiler-warning) you will probably be disappointed.

That's what I love about slashdot - every argument comes with references to back it up!

Re:Not so surprising

[definate]

Which is it Apple, Squirrel or Fish? Pick a side, we're at war!

Are you serious?

[TheRealMindChild]

If you look at it from a popular/performance perspective, you are going to find that, generally, the newer software is better performing, because that is a selling point above the competition. It will also be the least popular because it is newer.

Re:Are you serious?

[sapphire wyvern]

Newer software is better performing? If only that were generally true. Newer software is almost always *more capable*, but better performance from any given upgrade is far from guaranteed, even in the world of FOSS.

Re:Are you serious?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, well his sig quotes the singer(who's the cousin of Jonathan Davis from Korn) of a failed numetal band ...

Not cause and effect

[Sandor at the Zoo]

How about this possibility?

"Sucky non-standards-compliant browsers aren't popular"

I'm not saying this is the case, but any decent software developer can write a web browser that's really fast. Getting it to actually render the right stuff all the time takes a lot more work, error checking, and additional code. That's going to slow things down.

Re:Not cause and effect

[Mad Merlin]

Sucky non-standards-compliant browsers...

You just described IE.

...aren't popular

But you lost me here.

Re:Not cause and effect

[MoonBuggy]

Interesting idea, but the Acid3 test seems to disagree. In order of fastest to slowest browser (taken from TFA), the test results are (according to Wikipedia):

Safari 4 Beta: ------ 100/100
Chrome 1.0: --------- 79/100
Opera 9.64: --------- 85/100
Firefox 3.0.10: ----- 71/100
IE 8: --------------- 20/100

I do, however, agree with another poster who pointed out that it's odd that Safari was the only beta included. If they'd included Opera and Chrome's preview releases they'd have scored 100 on the Acid3, and potentially higher on the speed tests too.

Re:Not cause and effect

[marcosdumay]

"Sucky non-standards-compliant browsers aren't popular"

No, those are the ones that are popular. What people don't like are browsers that adhere strictly to the standard when the web is full of pages that don't.

Re:Not cause and effect

[noundi]

In all fairness nobody in his/her right mind chooses IE. MS just keep on coming up with convenient work arounds.

Re:Not cause and effect

[Reziac]

Seamonkey 1.9x gets 0/100, because the test script ran so slowly that it stalled out entirely.

Re:Not cause and effect

[The MAZZTer]

Acid3 isn't just about speed. In fact slow tests don't detract from the final score, they just show up as warnings in the report, AFAIK.

Re:Not cause and effect

[Rockoon]

Exactly.

Joe P. Enduser wants stuff to work. He does not care about web standards or anything else. Just make it work! Pretty pretty please!

John Q. Webdev wants stuff to be easy. He does not care about other peoples web pages. He only cares about the ones he himself authored.

There is no happy middle ground and much to the mismay of John Q, Joe P. is the real product in the web development industry. Thats right.. the product is not Browsers and the product is not Web Pages. The product is people. "Standards" mean nothing in industries like that.

Re:Not cause and effect

[MoonBuggy]

You misunderstand; the speed rankings were taken from the Futuremark article, which used specific benchmarking software. I just added the Acid3 results to demonstrate that fast does not equate to poor rendering quality.

Re:Not cause and effect

[memoryhole]

And as someone pointed out to that other poster, they DID include the Firefox 3.5 Beta in the tests (it clocked in at slightly better than Safari 3). This just wasn't mentioned in the Futuremark article, that's all.

Re:Not cause and effect

[amicusNYCL]

If more than one browser scores the same, like 100%, then the difference between them is speed. Since the score is capped at 100%, the only other thing to measure is how fast it finishes.

Re:Not cause and effect

[Anonymous Coward]

> I do, however, agree with another poster who pointed out that it's odd that Safari was the only beta included.

It's not that odd. If you go to Apple's Safari page, it offers you Safari 4 beta by default (with a small link at the bottom of the page for those explicitly looking for Safari 3).

Re:Not cause and effect

[theodicey]

Acid 3 was designed to have a fixed minimum number of bugs in each browser (~20), regardless of their significance. It's not a good metric of standards compliance, or anything other than how desperate different browser vendors are for good PR.

Features Create Popularity...

[TibbonZero]

Features create popularity, and popularity pushes for more features as users cry that the next browser over has something it doesn't. This create bloat.
Then again, over time, isn't this what happens with almost all software? They get more and more features as time goes by, and get bigger and consume more resources. Look at the size/requirements of any linux distro with a graphical system over the past 10 years.
No one wants to lose features, and users complain too much, so the only way to get a faster thing with less features is to fork it, or start anew (which is what the lesser popular browsers have often done).

Re:Features Create Popularity...

[SashaMan]

I think it's more like "Shipping your browser as the default on Windows" creates popularity...

Re:Features Create Popularity...

[nine-times]

Also, popularity tends to impede progress. The more people are using a software or hardware product, the more you have to lose by breaking compatibility with old version or doing something zany. Meanwhile, more obscure products have a greater need to do something a little zany in order to carve out their niche.

Re:Features Create Popularity...

[TibbonZero]

That doesn't explain why Firefox is so slow compared to Camino, Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc. If you were Microsoft and had a browser, you'd try to ship it with your OS too. Last I checked all popular linux distros ship with a browser (generally Firefox being the default) and OS X ships with Safari.

The problem historically hasn't been that Microsoft ships IE, but that its very difficult, if not nearly impossible to separate it from the OS completely.

Additionally, this isn't the 'problem' that the article talks about, its talking about it being slow. Tighter integration with the OS should make it faster, not slower. You're mixing up the real problems at hand here.

Re:Features Create Popularity...

[Blakey Rat]

Not to mention the popular browser are the older ones. That means cruft build-up of the type that Chrome simply doesn't have. (The exception to this rule is Opera, of course nobody uses that. ;)

If Chrome supported all the weird edge-cases that IE supported, and had the code support to handle the rats nest of HTML supported by 4.0-esque browsers, and had tons of marketing-inspired and now-obsolete features that some intranet somewhere still needs support for (like ActiveX), it probably wouldn't look nearly as good in the benchmarks.

Re:Features Create Popularity...

[Quantumstate]

Except the evidence in question provides a counterexample to your point. http://service.futuremark.com/peacekeeper/browserStatistics.action is where the figures came from and the more recent versions are without exception faster than the previous versions.

Re:Features Create Popularity...

[CodeBuster]

Firefox offers such extensive addon capabilities that this really isn't much of an issue. In Firefox the ability to plugin and addon was built into the design from the start, not thrown on at the end as an afterthought, that is why the addon community for Firefox is the best of any of the browsers currently out there. This allows those people who want features++ to have as many addons as they like while reserving the core platform for just the essential technologies. Firefox has shown the way with first class addons and now the other browsers must follow in order to keep up.

Re:Features Create Popularity...

[TibbonZero]

The first class addon system is what seems to make Firefox slow most of the time! I only have minimal Firefox Add-Ons installed, and yet it gets crashy even with those few. (Firebug, CoolIris, Alexa Sparky, Delicious) Yea, its a fun idea to have all these extensions, but I'll tell you that the debug window in Safari is a LOT more stable than Firebug (although not quite as full featured)

Re:Features Create Popularity...

[LordKazan]

firebug is what is slowing you down probably.. the others i'm not familiar with: make sure to turn it off when you're not using it.. especially on AJAX sites.

My plugins list is: Adblock+, Firebug [typically turned off], XMarks, FireFTP, Web Developer

In other words...

[JanneM]

Either:

1) up and coming browser makers see speed as an easy differentiating factor and target their browser for it; or

2) Newer products tend to be faster since they have the older ones to compare to. And newer products also are "up and coming" and thus have lower uptake than "old and entrenched" ones. or;

3) the public puts very little value on browser speed. Those spending their resources optimizing for it rather than other features get few users as a result.

Re:In other words...

[westlake]

3) the public puts very little value on browser speed.

perhaps because the most aggravating delays in loading a page are caused by problems which the browser can't solve

Re:In other words...

[Anonymous Coward]

Either:

1) You're don't know that either can only refer to two choices, not three

2) You're willfully ignoring that

3) You're just a moron

Re:In other words...

[Just Some Guy]

the public puts very little value on browser speed. Those spending their resources optimizing for it rather than other features get few users as a result.

Oh, but they do! They just might not realize it yet. I didn't think Safari 3 was particularly slow until I installed the 4 beta, and now I'd never go back. I didn't know how much sluggishness was caused by slow scripting.

As much as I dislike the phrase,

[Jamamala]

this really is a case of correlation not implying causation. Otherwise firefox's market share would have decreased from v2 to 3, and will decrease again when 3.5 is released.
Sure, it's a "fact", but I'll bet that in 5 years time this won't be the case. This "tidbit" does not allow us to make sensible predictions about the future of browsers.

Re:As much as I dislike the phrase,

[geekoid]

You need to compare the increased size to the increased size of the other browsers over ther same period of time. Check those numbers.
Example:
If Firefox increased in size by 10%, but was still smaller then competing browsers, the other browsers would take the hit.

Not that you are wrong, just pointing out why your examples isn't valid.

"...correlation not implying causation..."
Why do you hate that phrase? it's a good one, and something people always forget. Granted it's annoying when someone misuses it, but that's the person not the phrase.

Re:As much as I dislike the phrase,

[timeOday]

I'd say there's a very important causal statement here, which is that being slower at javascript does not in itself cause a browser to be unpopular.

For myself, what's much more annoying is when a page doesn't render sensibly (regardless of whose fault it is), and when the browser locks up (which firefox does a lot on ubuntu on pages with videos, especially cnn also youtube).

A similar correlation has already been noted...

[Anonymous Coward]

...with actors.

CPU Usage Observations with FF and Xorg on colors

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of the ones where they had the graphics/colors rolling around:
CPU Usage: 96% Xorg, 2% Firefox.

I've seen that happen on several other sites that have javascript doing funny things with the colors/images. Makes the entire machine/interface hard to use.

Question

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep seeing reviews of how fast a browser is/isn't. Am I the only one that really doesn't care? All Browsers render faster than I can read the page anyway. I care about the way the browser looks/feels/renders/features. Am I missing something?

Re:Question

[compro01]

In cases with extremely JS heavy pages, the browser may not be able to render faster than you can read.

see chrome experiments. While most of the stuff is useless twiddling, some of it, like Canvas3D, may find its way into real websites (in this case, probably facebook) not too long from now.

Of Course, the Google Web Toolkit

[eldavojohn]

You know when you try to use Google Reader and Google Mail and Google Anything on your browser with a poor Javascript engine (even the good ones occasionally fail), it sometimes blows up?

Yeah, the Google Web Toolkit (which I believe they are all using for a front end) basically produces code that produces one metric ton of Javascript and HTML that gets dumped on the client's browser. It's not just an application, it's a whole library of Java APIs that produces a ton of Javascript that could become the de facto standard one day. I'm betting it won't but I've asked why more sites aren't using it on Slashdot before.

At least Google eats their own dog food on a large scale.

Re:Of Course, the Google Web Toolkit

[drinkypoo]

Let's not forget gears, for which 64 bit linux users must jump through hoops :P It's necessary for offline gmail, and others... but it's there for firefox. So google may have their own browser agenda, but they are doing at least a fair to middling job supporting firefox :)

Re:Of Course, the Google Web Toolkit

[johnthuss]

Yeah, the Google Web Toolkit (which I believe they are all using for a front end) b

That's just flat out wrong. GWT is only being used by Google for one service - Google Health

Re:Of Course, the Google Web Toolkit

[inline_four]

GWT Java-to-JS compiler does not reproduce the entire Java emulation library (or even your own code) as JS. It only compiles the parts that are being used in your application.

Re:Of Course, the Google Web Toolkit

[Tacvek]

That said, they do appear to be using the same obfuscator for most other services. (Admittedly more as a way to minimize download size than attempting to obfuscate the code, but it tends to do both.)

NoScript and Adblock, Again

[Colonel Korn]

Javascript performance still doesn't matter for most users, and power users largely have Javascript disabled or blocked. Maybe Google needs to release a killer app that relies on Javascript and has borderline performance on anything slower than Chrome.

When we're just talking about loading web pages, no one is yet within shouting distance of FF with a good Adblock filter list.

JS benchmarks seem somewhat pointless for now. 99% of what we do on the web happens instantly (if you have a low latency connection) on all browsers if we stop the ads from loading.

Re:NoScript and Adblock, Again

[pipatron]

When we're just talking about loading web pages, no one is yet within shouting distance of FF with a good Adblock filter list.

Have you even tried this or are you just trying to provoke? I switched permanently to Chrome on my windows workstation at the office, just because everything is just so much more snappy compared to firefox, even when using adblock.

Re:NoScript and Adblock, Again

[CodeBuster]

99% of what we do on the web happens instantly (if you have a low latency connection) on all browsers if we stop the ads from loading.

Although I count myself among the AdBlock + NoScript users, a big part of the slow page loads with ads are the completely under-powered and over-subscribed servers employed by the Ad serving companies because they are too cheap to upgrade and pay for bandwidth. In effect, they are burning out the clutch trying to tow an 18-wheeler with a Honda civic and a make-shift trailer hookup. To all of the advertisers out there: stop being a bunch of cheapskates and get the bandwidth and server muscle that you need in order to meet the demands on your ad severs.

BTW: I have personally introduced dozens of my non-tech friends to AdBlock and they are completely stunned by the speedup that comes from dumping ads. It is like night and day and once their eyes are opened they will never be go back. AdBlock is the next killer app waiting in the wings; the advertisers should think about that when they waste our time with slow servers and annoying interstitial ads that go dancing around the screen and shouting about some product that 99.999% of people couldn't give two shits about. The more annoying and difficult they make ads, the more incentive people have to try and find a "solution" and any Google search concerning a "solution" to ads is bound to turn up AdBlock.

Re:NoScript and Adblock, Again

[yoshi_mon]

No kidding! Adblocking makes web use orders of magnitude better. Before I finally switched to FF from Opera for my main browser I used, and still do, my hosts file for blocking ads. However it's not the same as having Adblock that cleans up the webpage.

Put Noscript on top of Adblock and FF runs away from even Opera for the most part. And that's saying something because Opera as a rule is hell on wheels fast.

Re:NoScript and Adblock, Again

[Anonymous Coward]

>When we're just talking about loading web pages, no one is yet within shouting distance of FF with a good Adblock filter list.

Opera still loads pages to a usable state faster then FF. With Opera a page is usually usable long before it is fully loaded, in stark contrast with FF.

I use both browsers. Opera for important things like my online bank or webmail and FF for the rest of the web, because there are a lot of "funny pages" nowadays that are "Firefox only".

Re:NoScript and Adblock, Again

[muckracer]

> AdBlock is the next killer app waiting in the wings

Color me ignorant, but what exactly does Adblock do that Noscript doesn't (honest question...only using NS so far). It seems, Noscript blocks a bunch of ads too. Should they perhaps run in conjunction for best results?

Re:NoScript and Adblock, Again

[CodeBuster]

Color me ignorant, but what exactly does Adblock do that Noscript doesn't

It is possible that a website will serve ads off of their local server too in addition to the usual suspects (i.e. the well known ad servers). In such cases AdBlock employs regular expression like rules to further identify and eliminate advertising content. NoScript blocks entire scripts on a per domain basis whereas AdBlock can be adjusted to target just the ads. In the case of an ad server there is really no difference between blocking scripts from the whole domain or just blocking the ads, but this is not always the case with scripts from domains which are not primarily about serving ads.

Should they perhaps run in conjunction for best results?

Defense in depth is never a bad idea. For example, I also run Flashblock, in addition to NoScript, so that if I want to watch some flash content in a domain but not all of it then I can allow the script in NoScript and then select with a fine degree of granularity exactly which flash objects I want to allow. I like to customize my browsing experience and Firefox + Addons allows me to do that.

FF wokrs very well...

[Zapotek]

... with NoScript enabled.

No I'm not bashing, I just went to the website with NoScript enabled and wondered why the benchmark didn't work for a sec...hehehe

Re:FF wokrs very well...

[IcyNeko]

Actually, I already do curse Firefox. it's slow, memory intensive, and overall just a beast. Sometimes I resort to Opera or chrome. Other times, I go back to IE6.0. How funny is that?

Re:FF wokrs very well...

[WillKemp]

I curse it every time it crashes - which seems to be much more often these days!

application that will practically require Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

Then I, and many others will probably never use said app.

By the way, have any of you guys tried the "basic HTML" version of GMail? I actually find it to be quite nice and I greatly prefer it over the default JavaScript version.

What a fascinating correlation

[BlitzTech]

It's so unfortunate that researchers these days don't realize that correlation can easily be a coincidence, and not a real relationship between two variables. It is especially unsuited in this case given the tiny number of data points and, oh, the convolution of these results with other factors like OS bundling (Windows/IE) and time on market (All 3, most significantly Chrome).

A more interesting (and likely actually related) set of data would be browser performance vs. market growth rate. Where are those numbers?

Also, web developers don't curse IE because it's slow. In fact, many pages are still static and don't feature nifty DHTML tricks, so the slowness of IE has no effect on the page at all. We web developers curse IE because it's not standards compliant and because making both the CSS and those nifty DHTML tricks WORK in IE is like eating barbed wire. Firefox has acceptable Javascript performance and is mostly standards compliant, and the existence of the Firebug plugin makes it invaluable as a web developer's test browser. I don't think web developers will curse a browser like Firefox for slow Javascript performance like we curse IE for violating all the standards.

Re:What a fascinating correlation

[B1ackDragon]

I'm not sure they implied it was anything other than a coincidence. About the most substantive thing said (which also mentions time as a factor) was:

"It's surprising that even though cost isn't an issue, the browsers that offer the best performance are also the least popular, at least for now."

As for myself, I'm really glad somebody tagged this article with "correlationisnotcausation." For a second there I heard this result and just assumed that either popularity caused browser slowness, or that people liked waiting. /sarcasm

The more popular

[Propaganda13]

These guys are idiots.

It's obvious that the last letter in the name being a vowel has more to do with performance than popularity.

from low to high performance - a,e,i,o,u

Re:The more popular

[Anonymous Coward]

Does software ending in a 'y' display sporadic performance? Like it's 'sometimes' high performance, and other times no better than a software ending in a consonant?

These seems fishy

[mc1138]

The science behind this seems questionable at best... especially seeing how IE isn't popular so much as just saturated throughout the market.

Has to be said...

[Anonymous Coward]

Correlation != Causation

Done and done.

Correlation != causation

[hee gozer]

By that definition, if Firefox would limit network traffic to a mere 28kbps it would be on top. And RMS would browse the web faster then anyone.

People have benchmarked browser engines for years.

[mmell]

I've seen reports before on such trivia as render times, render accuracy, etc. Benchmarking browsers and rendering engines is nothing new.

What's so special about FutureMark(C)'s software? Or is it their advertising budget which desserves attention? I hope they really had to pay for their full-page ad here on /.

How long until Google comes out with a JavaScript.

[AbbeyRoad]

"How long until Google comes out with a JavaScript intensive application that will practically require Chrome to function?"

Ans: never

because 80-90% of the market will choose not to
bother with that application because they don't
know how to DAU-EN-LODE and install a different
browser.

Firefox performance boost

[tha_toadman]

Try this, Firefox users.

Here's a way to speed up your Firefox and make it MUCH MUCH faster.

1. Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit enter.

2. In the filter field, find and alter the entries as follows:

Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

Enjoy!

Re:Firefox performance boost

[DaveV1.0]

And why should any of that be necessary? Why not just be able to access it from the menu bar?
Where is the documentation on the "about:config" page and all it's options?

Re:Firefox performance boost

[tha_toadman]

Why not just read this: http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries

Re:Firefox performance boost

[AKAImBatman]

You're telling me that you need to read a webpage to configure Firefox? Gee, that's making a lot of assumptions, don't you think?

What about the cases where you don't have a web browser?!?!

Re:Firefox performance boost

[WillKemp]

And why should any of that be necessary? Why not just be able to access it from the menu bar?

It would be a nightmare navigating your way around the settings menu if everything that's configurable was in there. Most people never need to configure any of that stuff, so why confuse and bemuse them by including it in the menu bar dialogs?

It would be the equivalent of having all windows registry options configurable from the control panel.

Re:Firefox performance boost

[DaveV1.0]

I see you completely missed the point so I am going to make it real easy for you.

Aunt Sally, who knows little about computers and just wants them to work, downloads FireFox on your say so. How is she supposed to know about "about:config" or about a third party website?

Cousin Joe, who is an aspiring power user, wants to understand configuration settings for FireFox after downloading it. How is he supposed to know about "about:config" and it's settings?

Where is the documentation that lets even advanced users know of the existence of "about:config" and what it's many uses are? Is this information that is automagically implanted in people's brains when they download FireFox?

Re:Firefox performance boost

[DaveV1.0]

Bullshit. That is just a bad excuse for poor programming.

Let me introduce you to the concept of the "Advanced Configuration" option. See, you would have a configuration panel that has all the common, basic settings and then a button, or even a tab, that opens up a panel with the advanced configuration options currently available only through "about:config" and it would be easy to find for budding geeks. As an added bonus, there could be tool tips about each setting and a help button that actually gives decent help on what they do and what are good settings.

Re:Firefox performance boost

[Qubit]

Here's a way to speed up your Firefox and make it MUCH MUCH faster.

Then why isn't it turned on by default?

Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"

The page you linked to has this to say about that entry:
"Note: Pipelining is not well-supported by some servers and proxies. Things may break -- use with caution."

So it might work, or it might break your interactive banking session online. I'd be wary of giving this to anyone who didn't already know how to poke at about:config.

Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

From the docs:
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests (Integer)
Determines the maximum number of HTTP requests in the pipeline (sent sequentially without waiting for a response). Values greater than 8 are assumed to be 8; values less than 1 are assumed to be 1. Default value is 4.

It looks like you'll get 8 requests, maximum, not 30.

Re:Firefox performance boost

[WillKemp]

Good thinking.

It's open source, get cracking!

Re:Firefox performance boost

[tha_toadman]

Did you even look at the article?

The concept of Google must be above and beyond both Aunt Sally, Cousin Joe, and quite possibly, yourself.

I simply added a performance tip and your all up in arms about the documentation for it. Start reading and perhaps your find what your looking for.

If you insist on knowing how I found out about "about:config", I was annoyed at web address bar and the search results that it was displaying when I typed an address in. I simply Googled it and wouldn't you believe it! I found a story telling me how to shut off the "browser.urlbar.maxRichResults". It's set to 12 by default. I simply set mine to -1 and it's gone. THAT is how I found out about it.

Aunt Sally, I don't think would ever know or care about it. But, if I said so for her to run it, that would be because she asked me what I run for a browser and I told her it was Firefox and she wanted to run the same thing. As for Cousin Joe, he'd probably start by looking for it. It's not that difficult really.

Re:Firefox performance boost

[Reziac]

Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

Seamonkey has this set to a default of 64. Is that a problem?

I did the other config stuff you mentioned and then tried Google Maps (which has been painfully slow since the last messing-with-the-interface). BIG improvement. Thanks!

Re:Firefox performance boost

[DaveV1.0]

Why should I fix someone else's fuck-up?

Re:Firefox performance boost

[tha_toadman]

I'm not quite sure why it isn't turned on by default.

I use proxies at both home and work. I've used this performance tweak with my online banking sessions at home and I haven't had an issue with it yet.

This tweak was posted for power users to consider. Try it and see what you think. I'm not implying in any way that all users should do this...just those that want to get better performance out of FF.

Re:Firefox performance boost

[AKAImBatman]

Bullshit. These are experimental options. They're NOT turned on for a reason. Specially, HTTP pipelines really fraks with some of the less sophisticated web servers on the market. They get confused and don't deliver the right set of responses. Firefox has the feature for testing and developer evaluation, but it's not ready yet.

That being said, the vast majority of the sites you visit won't have problems. But you have to know enough to understand what those are and whether it is worth it to you to enable this feature.

For those interested in the technical side, HTTP pipelining is a feature that makes use of the asynchronous nature of TCP/IP sockets. Rather than doing the usual HTTP/1.1 request/response, request/response cycle of HTTP/1.1, pipelining batch-sends all the requests, then batch receives all the responses. In effect, it looks like request/request/request/request, response/response/response/response. Very effective at reducing delays from network latency, but potentially very confusing for the server.

Re:Firefox performance boost

[DaveV1.0]

What you did is point out a major deficiency in Firefox and the rest of FLOSS. I commented on it. It is a serious flaw that many people prefer to overlook.

Re:Firefox performance boost

[RpiMatty]

I found the advanced config page for firefox.
Instead of going Tools->Options->Advanced Options
you go address bar -> about:config

And here is the helpful help file that goes with it
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_FAQs_:_About:config_Entries

Quit bitching

Re:Firefox performance boost

[SanityInAnarchy]

In reply to both you and the parent:

Aunt Sally absolutely should not, ever, be touching about:config.

What's been suggested here may very well be improving performance, but also very likely isn't a recommended approach. For example: HTTP pipelining is a nice idea, but really doesn't have much of an advantage over opening more connections. And, too many connections can slow you down as easily as too few connections.

So, rather than suggesting that people should change about:config, if you really think the defaults should be changed, file a bug.

As it is, Aunt Sally is likely more secure, and much faster, once you tell her to install Adblock (which she probably can do herself). She really doesn't need to tweak anything.

Re:Firefox performance boost

[DaveV1.0]

Well, shithead, why is that on a third party site? Oh wait, I forgot this was FLOSS and documentation is supposed to be fucked up.

Re:Firefox performance boost

[GargamelSpaceman]

I knew about pipelining before your post having actually implemented it in a simple server I was playing with, however I always kindof assumed pipelining was ON for all modern web browsers since all modern web browsers support HTTP/1.1 . Holy goddamn fucking shit! This is a MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR speedup!!!

IMHO, this should be on by default in Firefox. If not, it should not be an about:config option it should be a menu item. Someone ( maybe me ) should create an extension to add such a menu item to firefox if the firefox team won't do it. Supporting pipelining would improve many things immensely. Maybe firefox should have a "Demand standards are followed" mode, and a "Deal with all the bullshit and be slow" mode that users can easily switch between.. Maybe that would be a good extention... Holy shit. You learn something new every day. Thank you.

Re:Firefox performance boost

[Logic and Reason]

I've been using pipelining with Firefox for years, and I've never noticed any problems with it. And in any case, it's not likely to break your banking session unless you also turn on network.http.pipelining.ssl.

Re:Firefox performance boost

[alexo]

And in any case, it's not likely to break your banking session unless you also turn on network.http.pipelining.ssl.

From the horse's mouth:
This preference is meant to override network.http.pipelining for one specific case--secure websites. If this preference is false and network.http.pipelining is true, pipelining will still be used for secure websites.

Re:Firefox performance boost

[Logic and Reason]

Huh. That makes... very little sense to me, but I shouldn't have assumed. Sorry.

Re:Firefox performance boost

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you are the only one bitching about it.

Re:How long until Google comes out with a JavaScri

[Qzukk]

because 80-90% of the market will choose not to bother with that application because they don't know how to DAU-EN-LODE and install a different browser.

In that case, Google will just email their browser install file to them, because 80-90% of those people will be more than happy to click on anything in an email.

Correlation, not cause

[Junior J. Junior III]

There's a lot of other factors in play to help determine browser marketshare. Among them:

1) Bundling with OS
2) Feature completeness
3) Product maturity
4) Cost

I think when you look at these, it helps explain why browsers are popular or not.

Opera: Fast, Lots of features, lots of maturity, but not bundled with OS, for a long time was not free, and thus not widely adopted.

Chrome: Fast, few features, not mature, not bundled with OS, Free. Yet still managed to grab 1% of marketshare almost instantly because of Google's ability to communicate the value of its innovations, its intentions with the project, and Google's overall good reputation with consumers.

Firefox: Fast-ish, lots of features, bloating as it matures, not bundled with Windows, but comes bundled with many Linux distros, free. Built up marketshare to where it is today through long, gradual, incremental struggle, FOSS activism, discontent with Microsoft IE, and word of mouth.

IE: Bundled with OS. Managed to obtain marketshare due to anti-competitive behaviors that put Netscape out of business, proceeded then to basically cease development and ignore its many faults until Mozilla and other projects finally caught up. Was really a lot more vulnerable to competition than anyone would have ever thought, because Microsoft over-reliance on OS integration, bundling, and pricing out the non-free competition. Once a good, Free alternative was available, IE started losing marketshare steadily, and will continue to do so.

Safari: Bundled with OS. Market penetration on Apple platform is basically 100%, although many Mac users may prefer to use Firefox or another Mozilla product such as Seamonkey or Camino. But Apple's platform represents a small minority of overall web browser market. Availability on Windows hasn't made much of a difference, as it doesn't offer anything compelling that puts it ahead of Firefox or Opera, and is mainly useful for web developers and iPhone developers to test with.

It's also worth noting that speed of rendering is not all that high on my list. Speed of resolving DNS, speed of resolving URLs, downloading resources makes more of a difference to me than speed of rendering. But the main features I value in a browser are that it is capable of working with web sites I want to use (and embracing open standards to get there is important to this end), and that it has all the features I want, and is exensible so that I can add features that I come up with.

Next most important would be security, although if I really thought of it I'd probably put that ahead or on equal footing with features and interoperability.

Speed and lightweight footprint are about dead last, although if they're not fast and lightweight enough, I'll complain about it, I probably wouldn't switch from Firefox unless they released something that was an unmitigated disaster on these two criteria.

To put it into perspective, I used to connect to BBSes on a 2400 baud modem back in the day, and could read text almost as fast as I could download it over a telnet session. That's about my limit for "too slow". If a graphical and script-heavy page feels slower than plain txt @2400 bps, that's a problem. For the most part, rendering takes a small fraction of a second and isn't a huge inconvenience. In fact, I almost find Chrome's speed of scrolling to be jarring.

Re:Correlation, not cause

[plague3106]

Once a good, Free alternative was available, IE started losing marketshare steadily, and will continue to do so.

Well, thanks for your opinion. But what about someone like me that likes IE8 enough not to bother with Firefox anymore?

Re:Correlation, not cause

[Blakey Rat]

IE: Bundled with OS. Managed to obtain marketshare due to anti-competitive behaviors that put Netscape out of business, proceeded then to basically cease development and ignore its many faults until Mozilla and other projects finally caught up.

IE was a better browser than Netscape in the 4.0 era*. Then to make things worse, Netscape basically gave up and didn't even release a product for three years. And it's Microsoft's fault they lost marketshare? Hah.

* If you take issue with that statement, consider this: IE was also more popular than Netscape 4 on the Macintosh. Apple shipped *both* browsers on the system CD and let the consumer choose their favorite to install.

Re:Correlation, not cause

[Junior J. Junior III]

I didn't say IE would lose ALL marketshare. But it's likely that they will continue to lose marketshare.

Firefox has advantages in that it is available on many more platforms, and I expect that those platforms will over time continue to erode the Windows platform's hold on the market. It's also more flexible, which matters for a lot of people, so I expect it will continue to pick up marketshare, largely at the expense of IE. Likely the same can be said for Chrome, and as it matures in terms of features and customizability.

As for Microsoft, I'll be happy if IE8 is succeeded by an IE9 and IE10 and Microsoft continues putting effort into improving their browser. More good competition is always a good thing.

Re:Correlation, not cause

[Junior J. Junior III]

Right, Netscape didn't have the resources to continue to compete with Microsoft. Microsoft had a huge pile of money to throw into IE that was being generated from their other business. Netscape didn't have that, and couldn't continue pouring money into development at the rate MS could into IE. As a result, eventually IE became better, and once it did, Netscape lost the war.

Netscape didn't just lose to Microsoft because of bundling. They did eventually lose because of technical inferiority. But they could not sustain the development race because Microsoft undercut them on cost and gave away their browser for free, bundled and deeply integrated into Windows.

Even so, many people continued to use Netscape because it was better, until it wasn't anymore. That didn't happen until IE4 came out. As soon as it wasn't, Microsoft basically had 90%+ of the market due to the Windows monopoly.

Re:Correlation, not cause

[Blakey Rat]

I actually agree with everything you wrote, but what really pisses me off isn't that Netscape couldn't compete-- that's honorable at least-- but that they didn't even try! Instead they broke out the lawyers, and decided their best tactic was to sue to buy time while they tried to re-write their application from scratch. Like you said, they couldn't compete with Microsoft's developers when they were going full-tilt, what made them think they could compete when they had to write *everything* from scratch?

It was just terrible strategy, and they frankly deserved to fail, IMO. The really sad part is that nobody bothered to compete with Microsoft at all in that space for so long-- of course IE6 was stagnant, why would Microsoft bother committing resources to a project with no competition?

Re:Correlation, not cause

[plague3106]

I didn't say IE would lose ALL marketshare. But it's likely that they will continue to lose marketshare.

Given that we don't know what either browser will do, I think it's silly to think IE will continue to lose marketshare. I'm finding accelerators far more useful than adblock was on FF, for example. Recommended sites was something I actually liked in NN4.

Firefox has advantages in that it is available on many more platforms, and I expect that those platforms will over time continue to erode the Windows platform's hold on the market. It's also more flexible, which matters for a lot of people, so I expect it will continue to pick up marketshare, largely at the expense of IE.

IE has advantages as well; the only platform seeming to erode windows is mac. Linux is still irrelevent, and will likely remain so.

Likely the same can be said for Chrome, and as it matures in terms of features and customizability.

I doubt Chrome will go anywhere, just like Opera remains a niche browser. It has a long way to go to catch up, and browers are moving targets.

As for Microsoft, I'll be happy if IE8 is succeeded by an IE9 and IE10 and Microsoft continues putting effort into improving their browser. More good competition is always a good thing.

I agree, but the only real threat is FF, and MS isn't likely to give the browser war.

Re:Correlation, not cause

[Rockoon]

IE: Bundled with OS. Managed to obtain marketshare due to anti-competitive behaviors that put Netscape out of business

They lost becase, as Joel Splosky put it, they made the "single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make...

...they decided to rewrite the code from scratch."

Firefox wins by association

[0xdeadbeef]

Unable to run Peacekeeper
Your browser either does support JavaScript or it has been disabled. Peacekeeper requires a JavaScript enabled browser with cookies enabled.

Apparently, NoScript is the fastest browser available.

Interesting Tell

[TheNinjaroach]

This just in: People don't choose their browser based on Javascript performance alone.

Re:Interesting Tell

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox is already dead. They crossed that point when they decided that one can't connect to multiple local self signed (same) sites. Warning and bells are fine, hard coded blocks are not. For an 'open' software application to assume they know more about the security of a site then the one connecting is beyond arrogance. They are worse then IE at this point and it is only a matter of time...

Re:Interesting Tell

[ProfessionalCookie]

This just in: [Most] People don't choose their browser.

IE was better..

[tjstork]

Managed to obtain marketshare due to anti-competitive behaviors that put Netscape out of busines

IE was better than Netscape, and, Apache did more to kill Netscape than Microsoft did. Netscape's money business was going to be selling expensive web servers to enterprises, and Apache gave one away for free.

Rendering engine

[AnalPerfume]

I wonder where the choice of rendering engine enters this discussion. I love Firefox but it is a tad heavy with the addons I use. Even before I start to install addons a bare Firefox profile does not feel as snappy as I believe it should. As much as I can't really adapt to Opera as my full-time browser it does feel snappier even when loading adverts etc than Firefox when blocking them. I have heard WebKit is a snappy rendering engine, Konquerer and Safari both seem to match that appraisal, so I wonder what Firefox would perform like if it were using WebKit instead of Gecko. I heard ages ago of a project that was aimed at doing just that, but ain't heard anything since; anyone know if it stalled?

Blazingly Fast Javascript

[Pinkybum]

If the web was really going to focus on "performance" the W3C should start working on a tag. Thus alleviating the browser from munging though all that text and then compiling.

Re:Blazingly Fast Javascript

[Pinkybum]

If the web was really going to focus on "performance" the W3C should start working on a precompiled_bytecode tag. Thus alleviating the browser from munging though all that text and then compiling. (Re-posted because I can't have angled brackets in plain-old-text how lame.)

Re:Blazingly Fast Javascript

[Anonymous Coward]

applet
 
Now why oh why don't we use that one? That's right, it stinks.

Javascript performance

[Twillerror]

I've heard a lot of talk about Javascript performance as intensive Dynamic HTML applications become mainstream.

Most of the apps I seen really don't have that much Javascript when you compare it to the amount of code that is in your typical desktop app or server side application. And ultimately many of the functions are small.

What I've noticed is instead their is a difference in the rendering engine itself. Javascript might be a single line to change the CSS of an element or change the visibility attribute, but then the browser takes forever to collapse the item...or the CPU spikes when some huge element of a big page disappears and the whole page has to move over/up/down.

Are we really talking about how fast the DHTML engine responds or is Javascript really that stinky slow that changing the element underlying take a while. I'm not sure I care if calculating primes in JS could made faster. Isn't most of Javascript just mapping down to a C++ library below it?

Re:Javascript performance

[WillKemp]

>Are we really talking about how fast the DHTML engine responds or is Javascript really that stinky slow that changing the element underlying take a while.

Mostly it's the time taken by the browser to reflow and repaint that slows things down - not the javascript itself. Minimizing reflows and repaints is a big part of optimization.

Re:Javascript performance

[amicusNYCL]

Most of the apps I seen really don't have that much Javascript when you compare it to the amount of code that is in your typical desktop app or server side application. And ultimately many of the functions are small.

That's true, people aren't taking full advantage of what Javascript can do at this point.

What I've noticed is instead their is a difference in the rendering engine itself. Javascript might be a single line to change the CSS of an element or change the visibility attribute, but then the browser takes forever to collapse the item.

That's also true. I'm using a Javascript framework called ExtJS to develop a relatively large application. It's got about 750KB of minified Javascript code (not including Ext), about 550KB of backend PHP code, and about 5KB of HTML markup. All browsers load some of the screens quickly, even with IE there's not a significant delay to display much of the application. The delays I see with IE come mostly in two places - grids and trees. If I have an Ext grid that has 10 columns and 30 rows, where the grid is able to be sorted, filtered, show/hide columns, drag and drop rows, etc, Chrome or Opera will get the records from the server and update the grid pretty quickly, a matter of 1 to 2 seconds where the browser has frozen waiting for the UI to update. IE can take a good 10 seconds to do the same thing, it gets the JSON data from the server and I can see the little progress indicator freeze as soon as the data comes back and it starts the UI update, that indicator is frozen for 10 or so seconds before it updates the UI. The same thing with trees, if it loads a tree that has 100 parent nodes each with several child nodes, IE will sit and chew on that for a while before it updates the UI. Again, Opera and Chrome are much more responsive. Firefox also performs better than IE, but I'm sure Firefox is hampered a little because I'm using Firebug, I haven't done much testing of the application using Firefox without Firebug enabled.

The demos for Ext are here if you want to see for yourself, although most of the demos are made to be lightweight and fast on all, they don't stress the browser much. The web desktop might be one of the better performance tests.

http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/

Re:Javascript performance

[BZ]

It's pretty common for a non-JS-heavy site (say cnn.com) to download several hundred KB of JS. That's a lot, for what is a pretty high-level language.... gmail and its ilk have even more.

But you're right that there are two separate issues here: performance of javascript itself (measured by things like the v8 tests and sunspider), which mostly matters for applications that want to actually do a lot of computation in their javascript, and performance of the DOM and layout engine, which matters for updating the state of the web page.

If you're trying to write an app that plays Go, say, the former is what you might care about; in this case the update is placing a stone and maybe removing some, and its cost is dwarfed by the cost of deciding _where_ to place the stone. At least if your app actually plays instead of plopping stones randomly. Similarly, if you're writing a spreadsheet, then the cost of recomputing values based on other value changes (and of keeping track of what values need recomputing, etc) probably dwarfs the cost of updating the text in the cells.

If you're writing something that just moves lots of things around on screen, or that switches between views without doing much other work (hey, gmail) or something of that sort, then DOM and layout performance is what you care about.

> Isn't most of Javascript just mapping down to a C++ library below it?

Not in something like google spreadsheets or an image editor written in JS (yes, these exist nowadays). Or if you want to have a word processor that provides its own spellchecker...

Odd how so many of the things google is working on actually do rely on fast JS. ;)

Re:Javascript performance

[Anonymous Coward]

You could always specifically tell the customers that IE was *not* a supported browser, and warn them that it might crash things if they tried it.

Then they'll open it on IE anyway, the browser freezes for 10 seconds to redraw things. QED, one might say...

Firefox add-ons are a huge benefit

[davebarnes]

I ran Peacekeeper with both Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4 on my iMac. Safari was 3 times faster.
But, Safari does not have the add-ons that Firefox does.
So, Firefox is the only way to go for me.

So what?

[lucag]

The linked article seems to be quite devoid of propercontent ... after a test of some browsers on just one computer (and, I guess, just one OS) they deem that there is an inverse correlation between popularity among the people visiting their site and performance.
Not quite what I would call an accurate and scientific approach!
This being said, there might be a grain of truth in the very fact that the more popular the browser the more "corner cases" are exercised (and thus have to be implemented). By corner cases, I do not mean what the standard dictates, but what you find (ab)used on way too many pages.

Re:application that will practically require Chrom

[marcosdumay]

I like it way more than the JavaScript one. At least on basic HTML I can choose where to open an email, at the JavaScript I'm forced to open within the same window.

Now, I can't stand any of gmail user interfaces (also, I don't like to trust all my mails to it), that is why I use POP.

Javascript

[WillKemp]

How long until Google comes out with a JavaScript intensive application that will practically require Chrome to function?

Like slashdot, you mean???

Reverse the conclusion

[Nerdposeur]

Assuming this correlation means anything, which it may not, it's more likely to be this:

The less popular your browser is, the better/faster it has to be to compete.

Re:How long until Google comes out with a JavaScri

[AbbeyRoad]

If there are two sites and the one requires me
to first click on something and install it,
and the other JUST WORKS and I DON'T HAVE TO THINK ABOUT A SINGLE THING to make it work, then your market is not going to want to bother with the former. Have you ever dealt with a large number of end users? Obviously not. Most people have already spent an evening figuring out the LABORIOUS COMPLEKSITY of installing flash which has more than enough power to run any kind of app that you might want to do in Java Script. Get real.

If I needed speed

[Ukab the Great]

I'd use a desktop application.

Re:If I needed speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but isn't that the whole point?

The reason we're talking about JavaScript performance right now is Google decided the internet-is-too-slow reasoning was death for their business model, so they made Chrome and massively hyped its JavaScript performance. Now every browser in the world is trying to compete and Google's real interest (being able to make fast internet apps) wins big.

Chrome was never really meant to win the browser war. It was meant to push an agenda, and it's succeeded big-time.

Re:If I needed speed

[tepples]

I'd use a desktop application.

Yeah, if you're an administrator on the machine. But a lot of times, you have to use a machine that someone else owns, and you have no permission to install applications.

portable Chrome

[rs232]

I installed SRWare Iron the other day. According to the publishers, it's basically a Chrome de-Googlified

Google Chrome Installer extracts into C:\DOCUMENTS and SETTINGS..\ so I tried running it as a portable app. Runs ok, now how do I get Flash onto the device. There is a reference to flashplayer-win.xpi, but when I try and extract it, I get corrupt zip file ..

I wouldn't need noscript and an adblocker if the advertisers weren't such annoying fucks with their dynamic scripts that freeze the page while they load and run, and their talking flash adverts that freeze the page while they take ages to download.

Re:portable Chrome

[Tacvek]

I'm really surprised at the number of people who use noscript. Adblock is not surprising, since sites often fail to follow the common sense rules of advertising. But what is up with noscript? I've pretty much never had javascript freeze the page or anything of the sort. (On the other hand I don't use dialup). The security implications of letting javascript run are actually pretty minimal.

Now, as for flash adverts, I've never had an issue with the download size, although sound is an issue.

As for advertisements, if they fellow the following rules I don't mind them.

Rule 1: The advertisment must be on the relevant page.
Rule 2: The advertisement must remain entirely within a rectangle on the page that does not overlap the page content.
Rule 3: The advertisements must be reasonably sized.
Rule 4: While animation is permissible, rapid flickering of any sort is not permissible, nor is automatically playing video. Playing video as a result of clicking on the advertisement is acceptable, as is a limited amount of automatic pre-buffering.
Rule 5: Sound is not permissible.
Rule 6: If a user chooses to interact with the advertisement by clicking on it. (Simply moving the mouse over it is not sufficient), the advertisement may do any of the above.
Rule 7: Automatic video playing and audio are permissible despite rules 4 and 5 if the advertisements are part of video playback.

Rule 1 explanation: It must not be a popup or pop-under.
Rule 2 explanation: None of those flash adds that project an appendage over the page, that can only be closed after the animation is finished, and usually by explicitly clicking on some part of the advertisement. Further, no pseudo-popups (utiling CSS to create what looks like a popup, but is actually part of the page), unless they do not cover the page content.
Rule 3 explanation: Non of those double height horizontal advertisements.
Rule 4 explanation: Those flicking adverts are obnoxious. Actual video can be processor intensive. However reasonable vector based animation is fine.
Rule 5 explanation: Obvious.
Rule 6 explanation: Once a user clicks on the advertisement, it may play video, play audio, overlap the page, etc.
Rule 7 explanation: That is to say, that advertisements like Hulu's and ABC.com's Full episode player are permissible.

However, there are all too many advertisements that violate those rules, which is why I do run adblock.

Re:portable Chrome

[reallyjoel]

Did you make this up as you went or did you have a list ready to paste?

Re:portable Chrome

[uniquename72]

I've pretty much never had javascript freeze the page or anything of the sort.

I don't use dialup, either. But I do view a tremendous amount of porn, and NoScript really comes in handy for that (so to speak).

Re:portable Chrome

[Eskarel]

I use noscript and actually don't use adblock,for a number of reasons.

1. It allows me to surf sites I don't trust. I need to do this both for work, and for personal use, sometimes the answer to a problem is on a forum on some obscure site, I'd rather not trust to run whatever javascript it likes.
2. It(along with flashblock) kills off 99% of the intrusive advertising and leaves the ads that don't for the most part bother me, allowing site owners who respect their customers to show me the ads they need to survive and site owners who don't to take a long walk off a short pier.
3. Generally speaking, not running badly written javascript(and a lot of javascript is badly written, I should know I write it) to run generally speeds up my web browsing experience.

In essence, noscript provides me protection from annoyance, security issues(which are actually a fairly big deal), and speeds up my browsing experience, with relatively little hassle.

Re:portable Chrome

[Antique Geekmeister]

Blocking googleanalytics.com, alone, is worth every penny I paid for NoScript.

Re:portable Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

Noscript is really useful if you need to selectively filter out javascript from websites other than the one you are currently viewing. For example, if you watch a streaming video that requires you to fill out a pop-over survey from another website, noscript is useful for blocking that. NoScript+Adblock Plus is the only thing still keeping me away from Chrome and on Firefox.

Re:portable Chrome

[muckracer]

> It(along with flashblock) kills off 99% of the intrusive advertising

Used to have Flashblock (great extension). But Noscript also blocks Flash, so there's no need for a separate Flashblock'er.

Re:portable Chrome

[Eskarel]

This is true, however I encounter the occasional site that has javascript I require, but awful flash ads that I don't, so I keep flashblock as well.

Re:portable Chrome

[Tacvek]

That's been something I've been meaning to write down. This happened to be the first time I wrote it down, but for the future I will have it ready to paste.

Re:portable Chrome

[Tacvek]

Good point, but can't adblock plus also block it? (I think it can, but I'm not entirely certain).

Re:portable Chrome

[orngjce223]

Which is zero, but let's not be picky about metaphors.

(I agree with you, by the way.)

Re:portable Chrome

[reallyjoel]

One could tell =)

Re:portable Chrome

[Tacvek]

Any thoughts on the list? I believe it successfully excludes most of the obnoxious advertisements, without leaving too many loopholes.

FF may be faster than IE....

[wubti]

when it finally starts. I am able to start IE and Chrome and browse to the page in both in the time it takes FF to grace me with it's presence. Just yesterday FF was ejected as my default browser. It may have a faster javascript engine, but who cares if I have to wait 40 seconds for the dog to load.

Re:FF may be faster than IE....

[RoboRay]

If it takes 40 seconds for FF to load, your copy is broken.

Re:FF may be faster than IE....

[ergo98]

It may have a faster javascript engine, but who cares if I have to wait 40 seconds for the dog to load.

This is like the start-up time of Windows being big news.

Not sure what you're doing with your browser, by my instance of Firefox usually starts up once a day at most, more commonly once every several days. I don't launch it everytime the fancy to load a webpage hits.

Chrome is pretty cool though, as is Safari, but thus far neither has come close to compelling me to abandon Firefox. I had stuck with Opera for some time before Firefox became convincing.

Re:FF may be faster than IE....

[wubti]

I turn my computer off every night and then the next day the first load just takes too long. I am not sure what FF is doing all that time (and I admit I exaggerated a bit, its only 15 seconds, while chrome loads in 3). I have been using chrome now for 2 days, generally its pretty good... But of course the real reason for my rant is, I really just want FF to work. I dont want to have to learn another browser and I dont have time to figure out why FF is so slow loading.

For the 1000 time, Srware Iron HAS adblock!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to run all right, but I'm still typing this on Firefox because Adblock trumps Chrome/Iron's performance & user interface design advantages.

Look closer next time. Adblock is part of Iron. Take 15 seconds to download and install the ad block list from their News page:

News

12.03.2009: New Iron-Release: 2.0.168.0

Today we release a new Iron based on Chromium 2.0.168.0. There were updates to Webkit and the Javascript Engine V8, so the new Iron version should be significant faster. Additionally we improved the the adblocker.

14.12.2008: New Iron-Release: 1.0.155.0

After Chrome 1.0 is released, you can surely download a new Iron, too. We have also updated the adbock.ini is,which you can get here. Further we have improved the Portable Version, it now accepts parameters such as -- incognito, to start Iron immediately to the "anonymous mode".

Seamonkey scores dead last.

[Reziac]

... because the script that runs the referenced test ran so slowly in Seamonkey that it stalled out entirely.

This isn't unusual... hie yourself to realtor.com and watch it in -- uh, inaction any time you like.

Re:Javascript is disabled on my browser

[Mystra_x64]

Actually parent is not troll. Most sites don't really need Javascript unless you use IE where it is used for tweaking. So you can surf the web just fine without it most of the time. Unless you are a fan of XMLHttpRequest and friends of course.

First things first!

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's services will have to be reliable first.

Firefox 3.5 rocks... when you turn tracemonkey on!

[hubert.lepicki]

This is a shame that firefox 3.5, at least on Ubuntu has tracemonkey turned off by default. I am developing really heavy web application right now (Dojo on client-side), and I was amazed how it's performance changed when turned tracemonkey on.

Now, just how can I explain my client to use recent FF or Chrome? ;)

Re:No surprise As far as i'm concerned, when it

[davidsyes]

comes to internet exploder, the term "popular" should be changed instead to "pervasive". To me, "popular" conveys a sense of attraction/interest/liking by the USERS or CHOOSER, such as choosing a car, camera, phone, debutante, model, etc. Developers and laziness and intertia in developemnt circles, and the damned GAMES msoft played to kill Netscape and others off made mshaft pervasive, but by NO means is that set of warze "popular" as in liked. If i have a say, the wand would be waved, and exploder gone "poof". But, fortunately, i don't have to be the axeman. msoft is doing it to itself.

Not quite that simple...

[Millennium]

A precompiled solution would be interesting, but it requires a standard for the bytecode. While there seems to be a move toward bytecode compilation in the new crop of JavaScript engines, actually getting them to agree on a standard for this will be difficult.

If you can get that done, though, then there's no need for a new tag. Just add it as a possible MIME type ("application/ecmascript-bytecode" perhaps?) on the script tag.

Not really..just see Opera

[Brad_sk]

Opera is not famous..but its fairly slow when compared to Fireox.

Re:Not really..just see Opera

[findoutmoretoday]

"When Opera's current ECMAScript engine, called Futhark, was first released in a public version, it was the fastest engine on the market" says Opera, but who cared then about speed.

Re:Not really..just see Opera

[sznupi]

Yeah, Opera is especially slow because of having Adblock and noscript built in, and also because of that pesky multithreaded architecture which makes GUI usable when you open dozen tabs in the background, and ALSO because of beeing able to handle very large number of tabs.

Oh, wait...

CRH...

[BrokenHalo]

Hey, I forsee a time when HTML will be regarded as a "legacy" markup, only to be accessed by a special extension.

We're almost at that stage now. It often seems to me that the only real reason for all that dynamic and so-called "Web 2.0" content is to deliver more bandwidth-intensive advertising. Maybe it's time to take a step back and have a Campaign For Real HTML.

NoScript is about Security NOT Ads

[WarwickRyan]

There are an whole slew of browser attacks which occur via JavaScript, Flash or Acrobat, and NoScript is extremely effective at stopping these.

That's it's role.

An side effect is that some ads are rendered less obtrusive.

However, for blocking ads, you're best off grabbing Adblock and subscribing to the relevent filterlists.

Re:NoScript is about Security NOT Ads

[Fluffy Bunnies]

What kind of pages are you browsing if having protection against those attacks is necessary? Assuming you're not constantly going to unknown porn and warez sites, is there really much of a risk?

Re:NoScript is about Security NOT Ads

[WarwickRyan]

Depends.

Would you expect MySpace to be safe? Because a lot of infections have come from there..

Re:NoScript is about Security NOT Ads

[slash.duncan]

Yes, there's that much of a risk.

Consider that a lot of the recent attacks are scripted ad based -- ads from some of the big distributors and hosted on some of the big sites, too. It's to the point I don't trust /any/ scripted ad, at least third party, even on sites I'd otherwise normally trust.

But that's only the latest reason. Since IE/Netscape 4 days at least, most browser exploits have required scripting enabled, even if the exploit was actually in something else (a plugin or activex component, say). While I don't worry too much about turning scripting on on most of the sites I visit, it's simply practicing safe computing to have it off by default, and only turn it on where it's actually needed. NoScript is the simplest way I've seen yet to have that "just work" the way I want it to, with sane defaults and exposing just the right level of tweaking ability to keep some stuff (untrusted) off no matter what, keep the rest off by default, but turn on enough to have the critical scripted parts of the page work when I want/need them to.

Also, someone else in the thread mentioned Google Analytics. I don't normally like tracking of any sort, and as they said, NoScript is worth it just to be able to put that in the untrusted list, so it doesn't get run no matter what I do with the rest of the page. Of course it's not the only one, but it's the most visible/common one.

While I seldom surf porn sites (newsgroups are where it's at) and don't do warez at all (I don't install anything that's not freedomware, no slaveryware here, warez or conventional proprietary), it's nice not to have to worry about security issues following the random google link or whatever. If I allowed scripting by default, I'd be a lot more worried about it than I have to be, since I don't.

SpiderMoney (the Mozilla JavaScript engine)

[IGnatius T Foobar]

How is Google's javascript engine in terms of loose coupling? Mozilla uses a javascript engine called SpiderMonkey which has all sorts of uses beyond web browsers. In fact, it's a really really good way to use JavaScript as a language for application extension/scripting. (Forget what you know about "JavaScript sucks" ... the things you hate are all browser/DOM related; the language itself is elegant and beautiful.) I'd hate to see this nice piece of embeddable code fall into disrepair.

As Click and Clack would say ...

[jc42]

Bo-o-o-o-gus.

This "study" didn't measure browser speed at all. It compared only the speeds of the javascripts that the browsers use. TFA says so fairly clearly.

If you're making heavy use of sites that are mostly javascript, this is a useful study. For the rest of us, it's yet another case of measuring a tiny corner of what is claimed, and then asserting that this measures the whole thing.

Using similar reasoning, we can imagine an oceanographer measuring the parts of the ocean along the beaches where most people are found, and concluding that the oceans average about 2 meters deep. (There's gotta be a good auto analogy here, too.)

As someone else has pointed out, most "power users" of browsers mostly disable java and javascript (and Active-X and any other misfeature that lets strangers run code on their machines). They may use NoScript with FF and enable JS for selected sites. Or they may simply copy the links to another browser such as opera or safari when they want to use JS. So to them, firefox and mozilla may well be the fastest browsers, since they permit easy selective disabling of all scripting features.

And we should also note that the time to render most web pages is mostly the download time. If due to network delays it takes 23 seconds to download a page, and browser X renders it in .001 sec while browser Y renders it in .01 sec, there's no practical meaning to a claim that Y renders 10 times faster than X. If the page takes 23.001 sec to render in X, and 23.01 sec in Y, few people will be able to reliably tell you which is faster.

If this were announced as a comparison of various JS interpret speeds, I'd take it seriously. But claiming that it's about browser speed pretty well discredits the authors (and the editor who wrote the summary).

Yup, No Surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called feature creep/bloat. Unfortunately, it seems a necessary evil of life or 'the nature of the beast'

Re:application that will practically require Chrom

[SanityInAnarchy]

I have tried it, but not for awhile.

The most obvious thing missing is: Keyboard shortcuts. I can actually navigate a lot of email in gmail without using the mouse. Can you do that with the basic HTML version?

Re:Killer Javascript App

[GargamelSpaceman]

A javascript based flash replacement, including the toolchains for development that Adobe provides, and libraries that make doing things that are easy in flash just as easy in javascript. I think that would be the killer app they have in mind, and have either already created, are creating, or are depending on the OSS community to create.

FireFox fail

[Weezul]

I'm not even slightly surprised, FireFox runs like crap under Mac OS X. Safari is soo much faster

Re:How long until Google comes out with a JavaScri

[CSMatt]

Really? Seems like at least 25% of computer users know how to install another browser.

Note that this demographic includes Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and pretty much all non-IE and non-Safari browsers.

I have the fastest - but its in Beta!

[failedlogic]

I've been racking my brain on creating the next browser to kill Mozilla, Safari, Chrome and IE.

I am not a professional programmer by any means but I think I have the world's fastest browser. I admit it is not HTML 1.0 compliant yet and must worn it doesn't do very much yet. It is able to access the 'World' of computing which is what we expect of any browser. I am going to upload it onto Sourceforge real soon after I add some extra code. I need to work on the architecture a bit and I have yet to make any substantial flowcharts.

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
 
int main ()
{
  cout << "Hello World!";
  return 0;
}

pwned!!

[hellfire]

Smoke signals here... I win!!

197,000 K

[sherriw]

I prefer FF because of all it's great addons but, generally it's been getting slower and slower. But then so has my whole machine and I doubt FF is the sole cause of that. I have 5 simple tabs open and FF (latest version) is hogging memory at 197,000K It's second in task man right after Visual Studio at 206,000K.

Ug. One of these days I should find out which addons are contributing most to this glut.

Yep.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are the JS-heavy sites my sibling discusses, and usually the slow part of a browser isn't in the delivering the result to the screen - so you have to wait before you can even start to read (Firefox). And browsers that render slowly can also be painful to use, as that can make things like scrolling (Safari) and animation (IE) jerky. And then there is the energy consumption angle. Time your browser is crunching JavaScript cannot be spent idling. This can matter a lot for embedded devices and suchlike.

Re:No surprise As far as i'm concerned, when it

[Mister Whirly]

Well, that may be your definition of popular, but let's see what Meriam-Webster has to say about the defition:

1: of or relating to the general public
2: suitable to the majority: as
a: adapted to or indicative of the understanding and taste of the majority
b: suited to the means of the majority : inexpensive
3: frequently encountered or widely accepted
4: commonly liked or approved


So defs 1, 2,3 are all pretty correctly describing IE. So really you have a problem with 4 being applied to IE.
Sounds like you may want to consider changing what you think "popular" means to you.

hah chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

if firefox didn't have any features it would be as fast as chrome.
chrome doesn't even have a context search...

Re:Poor programming

[GargamelSpaceman]

No, this isn't poor programming. There are so many configuration options that to build menus for them all would take too much time. Also, they don't/can't anticipate all the reasons why someone would want to configure at thing. Where should the setting be? Also extensions may depend on being able to depend on a config option being set a certain way and may set the setting themselves. If another extension resets it then those two extensions are incompatible with each other, but if there is a menu driven way to set all these settings then ANY EXTENSION THAT WANTS TO SET ONE must account for the possibility that the user might use the menu to change the setting. editing about:config 'voids your warranty' so if you do so, you might break stuff like extensions you have installed. Having the void your warranty screen makes it possible for extensions to set things and reasonably count on them remaining set.

Opera users ???

[baomike]

Should we feel left out , or just sit back and watch the cat fight?
Chrome vs IE vs FF is way down the list from "which Catsup(Ketchup) to use.

raw socket

[SmallFurryCreature]

Next!

Right....

[SmallFurryCreature]

Right.

1. How do you explain that IE8 is the youngest of the non-beta's and the slowest.

2. Why is it then that IE has more problems with standards? Does it check so much for broken html/css/javascript it can't even deal with standard compliant code? Oh and then explain how a trailing , in javascript FAILS under IE but not firefox.

3. So, IE8 has more features then firefox...

Something tells me you don't know what the hell you are talking about. Did you ever actually use any other browser then the one that came with your Dell?

Re:Right....

[jonadab]

> 1. How do you explain that IE8 is the youngest of the non-beta's and the slowest.

IE8 includes IE7 Compatibility View, which is built on the old IE6 codebase. HTH.HAND.

> 2. Why is it then that IE has more problems with standards?

See previous answer.

Oh please

[SmallFurryCreature]

I might care, if I didn't have to deal with a client who won't even update to IE7 at gunpoint.

haho

[Anonymous Coward]

Paraphrase it as "The more popular the app, the less effort developers put into coding" and it suddently makes a lot of sense.
We long know that many users base their "preferences" on something different than quality.
IE users simply don't have preferences... whatever you give them they'll chew & perhaps choke on.
FF users are obsessed with the free/open source or anti-MS movement, makes you instantly geek.

As for the test, it would be good to have one on rendering speeds. After all scripting is of no use if you don't render the page. And that's much more computationally intensive!

Curses

[fm6]

will web developers start cursing Firefox?

I already curse Firefox: slow, unreliable, too many irritating quirks. I've probably made things worse by installing too many dodgy plugins, but I think it's mostly the fact that its rendering engine is a bloated kludge. Seems to be designed more as a platform for XUL apps than as an efficient, reliable renderer.

I have issues with Chrome too (mainly that they expect me to relearn all my GUI idioms pretty much from scratch). But all in all, it's a much sounder product. Once Chrome's plugin ecosystem reaches critical mass, I'm gone.

Yeah, I know, plugins will probably introduce problems into Chrome as well. I'm counting on Chrome's API designers to to a better job of insulating me from plugin screwups. We'll see.

I say...

[EvilBudMan]

--What say you now?--

security risk - At least it's blocked externally but not internally where I work. Telnetting into Cisco PIX seems to be easier than using their web based way in.

Whoa, whats all this fancy tech?

[tacokill]

Gopher, checking in....

Re:How long until Google comes out with a JavaScri

[Anonymous Coward]

You use a lot of of CAPS randomly.

I suspect you're in the 80% of people that would click on paris_hilton_nude.exe if you got it in an email.

Firefox already slow

[Snaller]

I like the idea of their url bar, but its slow and freezes my machine before it has loaded some components into memory

Oblig. XKCD

[Max Littlemore]

http://xkcd.com/$(RANDOM % 500)/

Closed benchmarks

[BZ]

Unfortunately, the benchmark doesn't publish its code, and tries very hard to prevent anyone else getting their hands on it. I spent a day or so trying to reverse-engineer their obfuscation once before I gave up. Furthermore, nowhere is there an explanation of where the number the benchmark shows actually comes from.

This immediately drops its credibility compared to benchmarks like v8, sunspider, dromaeo, or anyone else who publishes their methodology for public review. It turns out that it's pretty easy to mis-write your benchmark in such a way that its results are useless (e.g. stopping a timer before the work you're benchmarking has actually been done in a browser that does it lazily)...

Not impressed with the benchmark

[Allnighterking]

Why? Well because it's about 80% a test of the underlying system (Ram, CPU, Video card etc) I ran it myself by doing a pretty simple check (removing 75% of the ram going from 2G to .5G) and the performance diff was huge. In short. They spend too much time testing the performance of the Hardware and too little testing the browser against itself.

palmsie

[Palmsie]

This article is absolutely absurd. It's pretty terrible that data are being misused like this. This is a classic example of correlation and causation. Assuming that everything they say about the data they collected it true, it doesn't mean that when browsers become popular that their quality decreases. It just means that popular browsers and low quality browsers are related... not that one causes the other. For example, murder rates and ice cream sales are highly related (they are, look it up), does that mean when someone sells more icecream that people die? No, it just means they they're highly correlated. Also, another flaw in this terrible article is that people are self selected to their website. It could just mean that more people who use IE visit their website for whatever reason.

I'll use it when it's usable

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll start using Chrome when it's completely free software (note that I'm saying this because I honestly don't know what license it is), and when it's buildable and runnable on GNU/Linux. Until that day, it's just out of the question.

They've added benchmarks for Firefox 3.5b4

[Xyde]

Seems like it's only slightly faster than Safari 3.2.2...so much for TraceMonkey.

Re:They've added benchmarks for Firefox 3.5b4

[BZ]

Tracemonkey speeds up javascript execution.

This test isn't testing the speed of javascript execution, for the most part. So while Tracemonkey does speed it up a bit, it doesn't help much, because most of the test's time is not spent actually interpreting JS.

yeah man, like, YEAH... but otoh no.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't toke and post.

Take it from me, I used to do it myself. Thought I was being all brilliant and persuasive until next day when I realized my posts all looked like your abomination up there.

Ad-block wins the day

[yanagasawa]

After using Chrome for several weeks at work, I switched back to Firefox. The difference is Ad-Block Plus. Not loading the adds far exceeds any performance gains from other sources.

Rubbish benchmark

[thexile]

Yeh just like FutureMark products. Being the most popular benchmark software, it is the slowest as well.

If popular=slower then slower=popular!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahhh. So in order to make the most popular browser, it has to be the slowest! Finally, the solution is there.

Analysis

[Eudial]

Did an analysis of the figures, mostly because there was none to be found. There's actually a pretty striking exponential relationship between speed and adoption. Here's a graph:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_lhmAHZ1VwRE/Sg2k-WLthEI/AAAAAAAAACk/iub7fBGjcfQ/s1600-h/results.png

Speed compare of Browser plugins:

[thomas3D]

Hi All.

Check out this new research: speed compare of different browser plugin technologies. (the speed demo also include java script) www.3djam.com/speed_demo.aspx (note that source code is availeble for review)

This demo is a good way to compare different programming technologies for browser client based applications.

Just as with the browsers the most popular (javascript and Flash) are the slowest solutions. :-((

When you try the demo then try to run the same plugin in different browsers (e.g. javascript and Flash) then you will see that even with plugins speed are quite different under different browsers.

Please also note that Roozz plugin is very different from the other plugins. As it run the embedded application in a seperate process, thus speed of Roozz applications are not affected by what browser you use.

Gecko and WebKit-based browsers

[martrootamm]

List is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#Gecko-_and_WebKit-based_browsers
Nothing that works in Windows, though...

Re:Gecko and WebKit-based browsers

[AnalPerfume]

Cheers, as far as it working in Windows is concerned, don't worry about it, my main platform is Linux Mint, my XP partition is hardly ever used unless there's no Linux alternative to a task I need to achieve. Even then it's a quick in & out and back to Mint. I'd have been gutted if your comment was "nothing for Linux" lol.

Maybe it's just me but I can't see any WebKit forks of Firefox. Maybe it's there and I just never learned the name of the project, or maybe the project was just an idea some people thought about but never took off. I'd love to see a WebKit version of Firefox to see the difference in performance. I am certainly impressed with the speed of both Opera and Chrome (I had to do some Zen syncing the other day in Windows so I took the opportunity to spend some time playing with Chrome).