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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Interesting Tell

[TheNinjaroach]

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

Re:Not cause and effect

[Mad Merlin]

Sucky non-standards-compliant browsers...

You just described IE.

...aren't popular

But you lost me here.

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: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: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.

If I needed speed

[Ukab the Great]

I'd use a desktop application.