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X11 Chrome Reportedly Outperforms Windows and Mac Versions
An anonymous reader writes "In a curious contrast to conventional wisdom, there are reports of X11 Chromium being faster than Windows or Mac versions. In the thread titled 'Why is Linux Chrome so fast?,' a developer speculates that it is due to the use of X11 capabilities: 'On X-windows [sic], the renderer backingstores are managed by the X server, and the transport DIBs are also managed by the X server. So, we avoid a lot of memcpy costs incurred on Windows due to keeping the backingstores in main memory there.' Has the design of X11 withstood the test of time better than people tend to give it credit for?"
What, you mean some X11 fanboi has a hard-on for confirmation bias, and led us astray in the article summary? Say it ain't so...
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
X Windows is a great example of this. Originally we had dumb frame buffers with no acceleration at all. And yet X provides an abstraction that allows lots and lots of hardware optimizations to take place.
Good enough that arguably the leading graphics vendor to support Unix (NVIDIA) had to do so by replacing massive portions of X11 to get it's hardware to perform acceptably due to the clusterfuck that is the X11 Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI). X11 has survived the test of time, but there is definitely lots of room for improvement.
Meanwhile X is still working better than Mac or Windows as a GUI framework.
It *is*?!
What planet are you posting this from? It's certainly not Earth. I think at the very best, you could say X was on-par with Windows and OS X... at best. Just because it happens to work better for this one application doesn't indicate that it's some holy perfect being, especially when it works worse with... virtually every other application ever.
Let me ask you this: when's the last time you saw a dragged window tearing in Windows? (Not since XP.) Or in OS X? (Never.) When's the last time you saw a dragged window tearing in X11? FIVE SECONDS AGO!
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I find it interesting that you declare "raise on click" to be "incorrect." You don't even pretend that it's a matter of opinion, or concede that the earliest successful GUIs all did raise on click.
Microsoft doesn't "fix" it because it's not a bug.
It does sound like it is libraries. A program running mulitple threads where the user code is in a different thread would not have this problem.
A.K.A. a buggy program.
It's not Windows' fault if a program locks-up its UI thread. Programmers have to at some point be responsible for what happens in their program.
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