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
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
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
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!
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.
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..
You just described IE.
But you lost me here.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
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?
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.
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.
Rethinking email
Like slashdot, you mean???