Slashdot Mirror
Firefox 3.5RC2 Performance In Windows Vs. Linux
pizzutz writes "Andy Lawrence has posted a Javascript speed comparison for the recently released Firefox 3.5RC2 between Linux (Ubuntu 9.04) and Windows(XP SP3) using the SunSpider benchmark test. Firefox 3.5 will include the new Tracemonkey Javascript engine. The Windows build edges out Linux by just under 15%, though the Linux build is still twice as fast as the current 3.0.11 version which ships with Jaunty."
This is nothing new. Running Windows FF in WINE is faster than using Linux native FF.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
The Windows version is compiled with PGO (profile guided optimization) while Linux versions aren't.
It has nothing to do with Ubuntu. Here are benchmarks from Firefox on Fedora: The issue is just as bad on Fedora: http://www.tuxradar.com/content/browser-benchmarks-2-even-wine-beats-linux-firefox. That's only from a few months
also worth mentioning is llvm. gcc-llvm has an llvm backend doing code generation (which sometimes beats standard gcc, sometimes doesn't). There's also a non-gcc c/objective c/c++ compiler, clang, in development, though it may be a couple years before c++ support is complete.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Firefox on Windows looks great/awesome/beautiful....name it. But on Linux, it is inherently ugly. The beast looks ancient and the fonts and dialogs make matters worse.
Folks, I am not trolling so have a look for yourselves and compare....
I'm running Windows XP and Ubuntu 9/04 side by side on similar laptops. Just to test, I looked at the main pages for Slashdot, Wikipedia (English), and Amazon, side-by-side.
My eyeball result of looking for differences between pages rendered with Firefox on Ubuntu 9.04 vs Windows XP:
Other than the issue for Amazon, the pages rendered look identical to me. The fonts for the menus look identical. I still disagree with the choice the mozilla team made to have the preferences/options menus with different titles in different locations for Linux versus Windows, but other than that, the UI seems consistent to me. The default GNOME theme for Firefox isn't as pretty as the new Firefox theme on Windows, but that's a minor aesthetic thing, and it's not ugly, it just isn't pretty.
Firefox on Windows looks great/awesome/beautiful....name it. But on Linux, it is inherently ugly. The beast looks ancient and the fonts and dialogs make matters worse.
In Ubuntu 9.04 here, and I personally think the stock DejaVu fonts on Linux look quite nice. Actually prefer the traditional toolbar on Linux with Tango icons (tango.freedesktop.org) rather than the "enlarged back button" version found on Windows and OSX.
The only problem I see is the topic of this thread, i.e., performance. It's slow enough to feel slow, and the fact that most Linux distros run so well on old hardware makes the problem worse.
The bigger problem for the "Linux browsing experience" still seems to be Flash. Visiting a Flash-heavy site (like the horrible items produced by any given automaker) is a painful experience...it's bad enough that I'll typically crack open the MacBook. I find Flash sites consume an order of magnitude more CPU running natively in a Linux browser than they do running in a Windows XP VirtualBox instance hosted by the same Linux OS.
AdBlockPlus and FlashBlock are the only things that enable me to continue to use this computer for web browsing. It's somewhat of a sad state of affairs, given that it's more than quick enough to run multiple VirtualBox instances, Eclipse instances, and a GIMP instance with dozens of files open at the same time. But give it one web page with a few Flash advertisements, and you'll think you're on a Pentium 60.
This is a myth.
I have barely ever noticed a performance increase when comparing code compiled with equivalent options on GCC, ICC and MSVC.
Quite the contrary, GCC is faster more often than you'd think.
Visual C is not "compiler specifically implemented for x86". It supports (and supported in the past) lots of architectures -- x86, x64, Itanium, Alpha, MIPS (and MIPS16), PowerPC, ARM (and Thumb), Hitachi SuperH, Infineon TriCore, several other embedded CPUs as well.
Of course x86/x64 are main targets, but my guess it is so for GCC as well :-)
The problem is that GCC is pretty much the only compiler on Linux used these days and while the code is very nice C++ compilers on Windows produce a bit better code still.
In my experience, MS's VC++ produces not just a bit better code than gcc, but whole hocking meeses better code. VC++ is a damned good compiler, no matter what one might think about the company that generated it, while gcc is a merely decent one, no matter how much one might want to promote FOSS.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
That stopped being true back in 2007 when they released version 10.0.
It is not a myth. ICC kicks the crap out of GCC. I didn't believe it until I had access to a computing cluster (Intel processors) with ICC installed. My ANSI C code runs about twice as fast using ICC than with GCC. Would you really expect anything different?
As always, YMMV, but I suggest that anyone who doubts this to download Intel's compiler (it's free as in beer) and try it out.
It's not open source, which does suck. But it does consistently produce faster code.
It will depend on what compiler settings were used to build the glibc library, what architecture it was tuned for, whether or not the glibc library is targeted to the specific version of the kernel you are using. It also depends on what options were used to build the companion libraries, as well.
Also, the last time this was discussed on slashdot, I seem to remember that it was Profile Guided Optimisation (PGO) that helped FF on Windows. This would allow the compiler to better structure the machine code to keep as much of the program running in the CPU cache as possible (by pre-loading branches in conditional statements that are executed more frequently).
Believe me, we'd really love to make Linux perform as well as Windows! We spent a lot of time in Firefox 3 with libxul reducing startup time by making symbols hidden and reducing the number of runtime relocations...