Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Here we are on the Slashdot plains in Africa, looking for that most elusive of species, the First Post...
Chrome was designed with JavaScript performance as a top goal. So why are we surprised it performs well?
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
So does this mean that Mosaic is the most efficient one out there?
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/
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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.
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).
Tibbon
tibbon.com
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.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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.
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.
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?
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.
My work here is dung.
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.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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.
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
"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.
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!
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.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Apparently, NoScript is the fastest browser available.
This just in: People don't choose their browser based on Javascript performance alone.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
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?
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.
Like slashdot, you mean???
I'd use a desktop application.
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".
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"
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.
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).
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I'm not even slightly surprised, FireFox runs like crap under Mac OS X. Safari is soo much faster
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
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.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
Did you make this up as you went or did you have a list ready to paste?
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?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.