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...

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[SonicRED]

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

Liar.

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:Mosaic

[bishiraver]

No - Lynx 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.

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...

[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.

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.

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

Interesting Tell

[TheNinjaroach]

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

Re:Mosaic

[geekoid]

Nope.

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

And probably better then using lynx

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:Mosaic

[James Skarzinskas]

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