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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?"
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.
I prefer elinks. There is a slight tradeoff in performance from lynx, but it is much more usable.
be really really wicked slow.
correlation != causation
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!
Whachoo talkn'bout Willis?
They compared Safari 4 Beta. Why is asking for them to test Firefox 3.5 beta such a stretch?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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".
Donate free food here
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%
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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".
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.
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?
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.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
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!
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
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)
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
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.
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
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.
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).
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/
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I use noscript and actually don't use adblock,for a number of reasons.
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.