Freeciv As Benchmark of HTML5 Canvas Javascript Performance

Andreas(R) writes "The Freeciv.net crew has benchmarked their web client, which is a rich web application using the HTML5 canvas element. This shows how fast Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer perform using the latest HTML5 web standards."

Comments

That's hardly a benchmark

[Anonymous Coward]

Now someone just needs to port the Quakes over, for a real benchmark. None of this turn-based strategy nonsense. :p

Re:That's hardly a benchmark

[biryokumaru]

Well, seeing as Freeciv runs at 7 or 8 fps on Chrome for them, I imagine Quake will run pretty phenomenally.

Re:That's hardly a benchmark

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

In the interests of deliberate perversity(and broad cross-browser compatibility), some madman should really just use the good old HTML table as a graphics rendering mechanism.

Make it 320 columns wide and 240 rows deep, for old-school flavor, with all cells empty, and just treat each cell's background color as a pixel value...

What could possibly go wrong?

Re:That's hardly a benchmark

[__aaclcg7560]

QuakeLive isn't too bad.

Re:That's hardly a benchmark

[El_Muerte_TDS]

QuakeLive doesn't run in the browser. It is just the Quake 3 engine wrapped into a browser plugin.

Re:That's hardly a benchmark

[elfprince13]

i'm pretty sure i've seen that :(

Re:That's hardly a benchmark

[Joce640k]

I saw it done in Excel once...

Re:That's hardly a benchmark

[Alphathon]

One of my friends made a similar PHP script about a month ago that drew Mandelbrot sets (again just for shits and giggles I think). Even at 400x400 it took like 10 seconds to load

Re:That's hardly a benchmark

[textstring]

here's conway's life in a fullscreen 20x20 table: http://etcet.net/projects/conway.html
it gets about 2-3 fps on my atom box. 100x100 is about 10spf

Re:That's hardly a benchmark

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

That actually works pretty well(albeit by pegging one core of a 2GHz A64 to do essentially the same thing that I was noodling around with on my 386 box back in the day...)

Re:That's hardly a benchmark

[clone53421]

Tried it, failed miserably, am now trying the same thing (as I was attempting before) using canvas instead.

In fact I was just trying to emulate a 25x80 text screen. Generating it was painfully slow. Canvas will allow single-pixel operations (in fact I’m drawing the text by slicing rectangles out of a .gif, which I embedded as a data URI and dynamically create the palette portion on-demand to set the foreground and background colours of the text).

I hit an interesting dilemma, in fact, which appears to be similar to the problem they’re encountering with Opera:
var img = new Image(); img.src = "data:image/gif;base64,..."; canvas.drawImage(img, x, y, w, h);
triggers an exception, because the browser doesn’t decode the image immediately and can’t draw it yet. But this:
while (!img.complete);
puts the browser in a spinlock, because it devotes 100% of its resources to the busy loop and never decodes the image; while the following...
img.onload = function() { canvas.drawImage(this, x, y, w, h); };
causes problems with this:
putch(x, y, "A", foregroundc, backgroundc); putch(x, y, "B", foregroundc2, foregroundc2);
because if the second colour was previously used, the image is cached, and the B prints before the A and is then overwritten by it.

The workaround, in my case, was to push the img and the x, y, w, h coordinates into a queue and write a flush function that does this:
while (queuedoutput.length > 0 && queuedoutput[0].img.complete) {
    var e = queuedoutput.shift();
    canvas.drawImage(e.img, e.x, e.y, e.w, e.h);
}
if (queuedoutput.length > 0) var t = setTimeout("flush();", 10);

...of course, this also means that before canvas.fillStyle = "black"; canvas.fillRect(0, 0, h, w); I must first ensure that queuedoutput = new Array();.

Re:That's hardly a benchmark

[Reapy]

That's not how you lay webpages out anymore? Geeze... It's been a while since I made one :)

Re:That's hardly a benchmark

[icebraining]

ASCII graphics in Excel FTW... Thanks to AC/DC! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9_YkXHCkgA

Re:That's hardly a benchmark

[SanityInAnarchy]

Generating it was painfully slow. Canvas will allow single-pixel operations...

You couldn't switch the background color of an existing element? That's a lot faster than regenerating the entire table, and it would give you "per-pixel" operations...

Re:That's hardly a benchmark

[clone53421]

Generating a table of any reasonable size with single-pixel-sized elements took atrociously long. I didn’t even wait to find out how long it would take to do pixel operations once the table was complete; it took far too much time and memory to set the thing up.

As I said, I was just doing a 25x80 grid, with cells the size of a full character (thus allowing control of a single character, its colour, and the background of the cell)... and that took a long time to set up. Trying to shrink the cell size would have made it much worse.

Re:That's hardly a benchmark

[badkarmadayaccount]

That should just about cover the costs for the cluster required for rendering the damn thing.

Drop IE8

[0100010001010011]

IE8 isn't the dominant IE browser yet. Drop IE8 support and offer the IE6/IE7 users a chance to go to another browser. If they have to get used to a new 'look' anyway, what's the difference between IE6->Chrome vs IE6->IE8?

Re:Drop IE8

[davester666]

Um, don't most benchmarks put IE8 Javascript performance like, an order of magnitude better than IE 7, which is like an order of magnitude better than IE 6?

If they showed IE 6, either Chrome, Safari and Firefox would all appear to run the benchmark in 0 time, or you'd spend 5 minutes scrolling to the bottom of the image to see the relative 'performance' of IE 6.

This is assuming of course, magical versions of IE 6 and 7 that even partially supports HTML5...

Re:Drop IE8

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

For the home user, not much, and Google's sneaky updates in the background model will piss them off less than Microsoft's blatant tooltips whining at you to update.

To the gimlet-eyed corporate IT guy who controls the browser on 10,000 seats and DroneCorp Inc, LLC, on the other hand, it will pretty much come down to "Which one will allow me to break anything you might possibly do instead of your work just by clicking at group policy objects for a few minutes?" and "Which one will pull updates from WSUS?". This is why Chrome's marketshare is increasing at a fair clip; but the worker bees at DroneCorp Inc, LLC will be getting IE7 sometime in 2012...

Re:Drop IE8

[deniable]

If it was just GPOs and WSUS, IE8 would dominate simply for security reasons. The main reason for IE6 is the combination of idiotic managers/developers that have locked a lot of applications into IE6 only. As for 2012, we got approval to upgrade to IE7 six months ago. Thanks, Oracle.

Re:Drop IE8

[Bios_Hakr]

Freeciv should probably be blocked at work anyway.

We used to have an old client/server installed in the office a few years ago. It was a fun game to login every hour or two and do a turn or two.

But these days, SmartFilter pretty much grabs everything that isn't work-related.

Re:Drop IE8

[smash]

NTLM/windows domain authentication - single sign-on.

I haven't seen an alternative browser that it works reliably on yet. Yes, its a windows specific thing, but until other browsers properly support single sign on you're not going to get them into the corporate workplace in any fully supported manner. And if they're not at work, they're less likely to end up getting installed at home, either.

I mean, i'm an admin and run plenty of different browsers, but from a "please why won't the users leave me alone" perspective, properly patched IE plus any half competent malware protection (corporate firewall, managed AV solution, etc) IE on the corporate desktop wins.

Re:Drop IE8

[BitZtream]

It will be by the end of the year, the new look isn't much different than IE7 as far as I've seen, and it comes with the most popular OS on the planet. Dropping support for IE8 is a most idiotic thing to do, regardless of how shitty it is.

Re:Drop IE8

[dbIII]

The problem is not the "corporate IT guy". Instead it's the lazy developers that insist that their product of 2010 will only work on IE6 running as Admin with three different versions of dotnet. I wish these MS Windows application developers would actually learn about the platform they develop for instead of thinking it's still MSDOS with no network.

Re:Drop IE8

[Cederic]

The main reason for IE6 is the combination of idiotic managers/developers that have locked a lot of applications into IE6 only.

Would you:
- pay 38 vendors between £20k and £3m each to migrate your old versions of their software to a new browser, or
- manually rewrite the UI of 60 systems, or
- keep the web browser that continues to work with 60 systems from 38 vendors, requires no new testing, no new hardware, no new licences and saves you a massive change overhead you just don't need

Having made that decision in a manner that achieves the best outcome for the customers, the owners of the business and the staff (in that order), would you when writing new software:
- build in support for the browser deployed to 20,000 staff desktops, or
- add 30% to your project budget to build in support for a browser deployed to 7 staff desktops (and they shouldn't bloody have it either)

Blaming managers/developers for being idiots disregards a lot of very sensible, rational and conscious decision making.

Obviously there are strategies, approaches and options that enable a move away from a given web browser, but as most organisations have more business and IT change identified than they have the capacity to fund or implement, it's seldom high on the priority list. After all, crap or otherwise, it works.

Re:Drop IE8

[TheRaven64]

Wow, knee-jerk overreaction. He criticised the original decision of deploying IE6-only web apps, not the decision to continue using them. If you purchase a web app and don't make cross-browser compatibility a requirement before signing anything then, yes, you are an idiot. The entire point of web apps is that they make it easy to replace the client. If they require a specific client - or, worse, a specific version of a specific client - then you may as well get them to write a native desktop GUI; you'll get better performance, be just as locked in to the client OS, but not be locked in to a specific browser.

Re:Drop IE8

[Cederic]

It's the difference between ideal approach and pragmatic real-world approach.

Vendor A offers IE6 support only (back when it was IE6 or Netscape) and meets 90% of the requirements out of the box; Vendor B offers IE6 and Netscape support but only meets 60% of the requirements out of the box. Since nobody has Netscape installed it's a complete no-brainer to buy from Vendor A, even though you get browser lock-in as a result.

The entire point of web apps in a business environment isn't the ease of replacing the browser, it's the ease of replacing the version of the software being rendered by the browser, and not having to install a separate client for each system - you install one browser once and everything uses it.

The knee-jerk overreaction was merely highlighting that people don't make bad decisions on purpose. They make complex decisions with a lot of compromises and browser support is merely another compromise.

Even if you do mandate multi-browser support, the IE6 based system requires IE6, Netscape or Lynx (as its chosen browsers). You still haven't got IE8, Firefox or iPhone/Safari support because they just didn't exist back then. It's pretty harsh calling someone an idiot for buying a system that doesn't support technology that doesn't exist.

Re:Drop IE8

[atamido]

What benefit is there to upgrading to IE7 over IE8? Did that much stuff really break between the two?

Re:Drop IE8

[atamido]

Enabling NTLM in Firefox is URI specific. I haven't seen any issues with it though.

Re:Drop IE8

[tepples]

NTLM/windows domain authentication - single sign-on.

Have your users run IE 8 (not 6) through an HTTP proxy that has access only to these sites, and have them run Chrome or Firefox for everything else.

Re:Drop IE8

[tepples]

Um, don't most benchmarks put IE8 Javascript performance like, an order of magnitude better than IE 7, which is like an order of magnitude better than IE 6?

A better way is to get all IE users onto Chrome Frame to run this web application.

Re:Drop IE8

[ClosedSource]

This seems like a non-problem to me. Use IE6 for those apps that require it. Use one of the other browsers for everything else.

Assuming, of course, that the desire to switch browsers isn't limited to the IT department - IT is a service function after all.

Re:Drop IE8

[ClosedSource]

"The entire point of web apps is that they make it easy to replace the client."

I see. The justification for web apps is pretty slim.

Re:Drop IE8

[thetoadwarrior]

I'm on the fence about that. I prefer to have full control over when something is updated. However I update my browsers all the time so why does it matter if it happens on its own? But more importantly so many don't update their browser which causes absolute nightmares for security and web developers so again it's a good thing.

Re:Drop IE8

[deniable]

Somewhat better security. IE8 is 'unsupported' and the vendor automatically closes any support ticket not using a supported browser. We can also now use a normal JVM, not the Oracle one, and this has made a lot of things easier.

Re:Drop IE8

[smash]

Then I've still got two browsers to maintain. They shouldn't be fucking around on the internet at work in any case. For the record, I've rolled 8 out and we have only had a few niggles with internal application type sites that need to be added to the pop up blocker's allow list. Other than that, its fine.

Our policy at work is use whatever IE version we roll out (we have mandatory proxy use / managed anti-malware protection everywhere), if you install another browser, on your head be it. You can use it if you want, but you need to figure out the proxy settings to get out and it is completely unsupported.

Re:Drop IE8

[smash]

OH... also, our HTTP proxy uses windows auth.

Put the password in firefox and save it you say? Yeah, sure if they're not a fucking moron user.

If they ARE a typical moron user, 3 months comes around, they change their password, expect it to have magically updated in firefox/chrome/whatever, click OK 3 times and lock themselves out.

Don't get me wrong, I avoid IE8 for everything I can, but when responsible for a corporate network, trying to reliably support anything else out in the field (that can't be configured via group policy, doesn't do updates via WSUS, etc) - is a pain in the arse.

Re:Drop IE8

[smash]

Aaand... one more reason not to go that route...

Rolling out/upgrading chrome/firefox on a corporate network in a controlled manner is a pain in the arse.

I rolled out IE8 the other day with a few clicks in WSUS. I know exactly what patch level all the machines are on, which ones are still yet to be fired up and update, etc.

Trying to do that with Firefox/Chrome without a bunch of scripting and/or tools we don't already have (eg, WSUS)? I'd still be at it next month.

Re:Drop IE8

[tepples]

3 months comes around, they change their password

What problem does password expiry solve? If not, password expiry is part of the problem.

Re:Drop IE8

[badkarmadayaccount]

Quick, somebody come up with a way to run IE only HTML+JS in FF/GC! Add-on anybody? And no, embedding Trident in a tab doesn't count.

Re:Drop IE8

[petermgreen]

While what you say is true to an extent generally webapps designed to work with any browser from the start will likely continue to do so. Webapps designed arround IE6 specific features are breaking all over the place.

Re:Drop IE8

[smash]

Leaked passwords. We had half the company accessing the internet via on guy's account for example.

Sure, they still leak, but the extent is more contained if they eventually expire.

Re:Drop IE8

[tepples]

Leaked passwords. We had half the company accessing the internet via on guy's account for example.

Passwords leak even more easily if they are written on sticky notes because the user can't remember what he or she changed it to. In my opinion, it's better to build systems to detect whether "half the company [is] accessing the internet via on guy's account".

Not fast

[Toonol]

Worth noting that Chrome, as the fastest, is still only eight frames per second, which would be dreadful even for a turn-based game. I didn't see where they said how powerful of a machine they ran it on, so I assume it's a moderately powerful pc. Still, it's within an order of magnitude of where it needs to be, so it'll probably be running smoothly within a year or two.

Re:Not fast

[tpgp]

which would be dreadful even for a turn-based game.

Erm, wouldn't a turn based game only need to refresh once per turn?

Re:Not fast

[maitai]

I'd assume it's not. I ran their benchmark with Chrome on Win 7 and my Sony laptop and got 43.8ms as the result which is quite a bit faster than they listed as their result.

I also got 149.72 with FF 3.6, which again is quite a bit faster.

Re:Not fast

[jo42]

only eight frames per second

And this, kids, is why we don't run applications inside of web browsers.

Re:Not fast

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people like to scroll around the map a bit while they're planning their turn . . .

Re:Not fast

[onefriedrice]

Computer processing speed has increased well over an hundredfold over the past decades; so what do we do with all the extra power? We rewrite games we played many years ago on top of so many layers of abstraction that they're no longer playable, even on our modern hardware. Hurray for progress.

Re:Not fast

[kestasjk]

8fps is fine for Freeciv. (And by the way check out Freeciv, especially if you liked any of the Civilization series. I am stoked to hear they're getting it working within a browser; goodbye productivity!)

Re:Not fast

[BitZtream]

No, the data updates once per turn. Things like animations (not sure that freeciv uses any) and moving the map around for a different view can happen many times in the interium, and of course as you send it all the commands each turn for what to do, loading UI displays and such, all of that is running at 8fps too.

Re:Not fast

[longhairedgnome]

Like

Re:Not fast

[Rogerborg]

And I believe the trend will be for consumer CPUs to aim for lower heat and power, rather than higher speed. Unfortunately, the abstraction layers just keep piling on there.

Give it another few years, and we might not be able to emulate Commodore 64 games on the desktop any more.

Re:Not fast

[delinear]

only eight frames per second

And this, kids, is why we don't run applications inside of web browsers.

... yet. Besides, you seem to be equating games with apps - there would be a lot of non-game apps that would happily run at 8fps. Graphing or spreadsheet apps don't need killer refresh rates and even something with more animation like powerpoint wouldn't look horrible (well, no more so than the actual product) at that rate. If anything, business apps are likely to drive a more widespread adoption of HTML5-based browsers in corporate environments, which will in turn allow more effort to be devoted to pushing the boundaries of the current technology.

Re:Not fast

[Hurricane78]

Obligatory thedailywtf.com link: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Inner-Platform_Effect.aspx

Re:Not fast

[TheRaven64]

Meh. We run lots of things in slow ways. Remember all of those games you used to play that took 100% of your computer or console's power? Now I run them in something that emulates the entire system. Oh, and they run faster than they did back then too.

I ran Civilisation on a 16MHz 386SX. An x86 emulator written in JavaScript running in a browser on a modern PC will get better performance than that. FreeCiv is a bit more processor-intensive than the original Civilisation, but it can probably handle rendering on the client.

You might remember those old NeXT workstations from the '80s. They ran a PostScript VM in the window server and everything on the display was created by small PostScript programs. These used the same drawing model as the canvas tag, but a stack-based language which was directly interpreted (no JIT, unlike a modern JavaScript engine). And yet, the NeXT systems had a reputation for beautiful graphics.

A modern browser is finally a system that does Display PostScript / NeWS right.

Re:Not fast

[tkinnun0]

Where does the notion that a crappy business app is acceptable come from? If you bought a crappy game then you have a problem. If you have to use a crappy business application then not only do you have a problem, your employer has a problem too.

Re:Not fast

[pak9rabid]

Unfortunately, the abstraction layers just keep piling on there.

Well, to be fair, they're just re-writing software the way it should have been done in the first place, but couldn't originally due to the hardware's limited capabilities.

Re:Not fast

[ClosedSource]

"And yet, the NeXT systems had a reputation for beautiful graphics."

Sure. Both users agreed.

Re:Not fast

[ClosedSource]

My theory was that Sun wanted to get everybody switched to Java and then sell people Java acceleration hardware under the principle of WORABFOOSH: Write Once Run Anywhere But Fast Only On Sun Hardware.

That's why they were so pissed at MS - A windows-accelerated Java made a Java accelerator unnecessary.

Re:Not fast

[rliden]

I use Chrome and tried the game out. The game seemed fairly playable and if the animation was jagged I didn't really notice it. I also haven't really played the game before except a few years ago when I use LInux, so maybe to a regular player they might notice the difference. What really amazed me is that the game played, looked pretty good, and there was no Flash. It was exciting to see something like that work so well.

For reference I use the Chrome Beta channel (there are 3 stable, beta, and dev). My system is an HP e9290 with an i920/2.6Ghz, 9MB tri-channel, Nvidia 260GTX/1.8GB) running Windows 7 Home Premium - 64bit. Since it's a fairly new system maybe that makes a difference, or maybe not since I've seen some 32 bit apps that still perform like crap. It just shows that more hardware power can't always overcome poorly coded software limitations. It would be really cool if there was an option in the game to display the current framerate for an easy comparison.

In any event I think it's cool that these guys are embracing this head on. Hopefully IE9 will support HTML5. That could make a huge difference in adoption and progress.

Re:Not fast

[rliden]

When I tried the game out it scrolled just fine. See my post above for my system specs if that makes a difference. I think the game played just fine except I don't really know how to play it and help/tutorials are still limited to their forum help.

Re:Not fast

[SeanMon]

[S]o what do we do with all the extra power?

Run Flash. In a browser. On top of a virtualized OS. To watch a cat jump into a box and fall over.

Re:Not fast

[badkarmadayaccount]

Transmeta's approach, along with a good VISC (LLVA for instance) exported via a driver ought to work. Add hardware reference counting and pointer compression, compiler protection, run time profiling and inlineing/specialization and we have a winner. With such technology we can have transparent for both application and OS RDMA and protocol offloading to appropriate hardware (GPGPU).

Re:Not fast

[pak9rabid]

You, sir, have obviously never tackled writing software targeted for multiple platforms (and no, writing something in Java doesn't count).

They want me to sign up

[bunbuntheminilop]

This seems like a con to get me to sign up to their service.

Re:They want me to sign up

[DMUTPeregrine]

That's because they are benchmarking the service, which requires one to be signed in to use. If you don't care about replicating the results yourself, then just read the article and don't sign up.
Quick and dirty paste of the results, for the lazy:
Web Browser | Operating System | Average Rendering Time| Frames / Second
Google Chrome 4.0.249.78 (36714) | Windows Vista | 126ms | 7,9 fps
Google Chrome 4.0.249.30 | OpenSuSE Linux | 128ms | 7,8 fps
Safari 4.0.4 | Windows Vista | 222ms | 4,5 fps
Firefox 3.7a1 | Windows Vista | 385ms | 2,5 fps
Firefox 3.6 | Windows Vista | 405 ms | 2,5 fps
Firefox 3.0.15 | OpenSuSE Linux | 689 ms | 1,5 fps
Internet Explorer 8.0 | Windows Vista | 1756 ms | 0,6 fps

Re:They want me to sign up

[maitai]

I'm going to mention I got a score of 149.72ms using Windows 7 and FF 3.6 on my laptop. Which doesn't matter much since my hardware is probably much difference that what they used to do their benchmark. But their 405ms seems pretty dang slow.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Opera?

[biryokumaru]

They had rendering issues with Opera's implementation of one of the functions they were using. One of the Opera developers is actively helping them fix it, which is pretty impressive on Opera's side.

In case anyone was wondering...

[Beardydog]

The iPhone is not quite fast enough : /

Re:what the fuck?

[__aaclcg7560]

May /. isn't as cool as it used to be? Seriously, when was the last time /. got slashdotted?

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[cbhacking]

Clearly you didn't even read the article, just looked at numbers. IE should not have even been tested - it does not support HTML5 canvas elements! They worked around this using a bunch of really ugly hacks that completely destroyed the performance, but honestly they'd have been better off simply saying "it doesn't work, we'll wait until IE9, thanks for giving us Acid2 compatibility but you've got a long way to go!"

IE8 actually works pretty damn well for much of the modern web; it's far from the fastest but it's fast enough for most, it is compatible with CSS2 and the other standards most web developers still use, and it has fixed most of the issues that people have cursed at IE over for so long. However, it has very little support for new standards - its CSS3 is still limited, and as far as I know it supports no HTML5 at all. Compared to the rapid improvement of other browsers, the IE team had better be on their toes or they'll be left far behind in the dust.

Re:Opera?

[CannonballHead]

Try looking at the comments on the linked page. There's an opera dev that has commented and they appear to be working on getting it working.

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[Anonymous Coward]

Worth pointing out that HTML5 isn't a standard yet. It's still in draft for the next couple years.

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because all these browser makers falling all over themselves to implement a half baked, incomplete standard that nobody's using for much of anything are so ahead of the game, amiright? Nobody but neckbeards cares about HTML5...yet.

Re:Opera?

[BigDXLT]

Indeed. I found the comments more interesting than the article.

Re:what the fuck?

[obarthelemy]

Cowboyneal has worked out a system to automatically transfer all 2 posts where they belong.

Or someone sold out.

Re:what the fuck?

[obarthelemy]

... all posts less than 2...

come on slashcode !

Re:Graphics

[The boojum]

Ugh, yes. I don't even use either of those services.

I couldn't find a control specifically for them, but I did discover that turning on Help & Preferences > Layout > Use Classic Index seemed to kill them without too much impact.

Re:Graphics

[pipingguy]

Thanks, that seems to have worked.

I'm still a bit pissed-off that such a change would be made, unannounced, to people like me that actually pay for their services. This is a bit angrifying.

Safari on Snow Leopard?

[EmotionToilet]

Would testing it in Safari on Snow Leopard make much of a difference compared to the 32-bit Windows version? To me it seems Safari is always snappier on OS X. My general rule is that on Windows I use Chrome and on OS X I use Safari. This just seems to work well for me.

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[Sycraft-fu]

IE8 is sure not slow for most web browsing. I messed with it recently before deciding to go back to Firefox and it displays normal web pages noticeably faster. In either case we are talking like a second or less, but still. Most websites out there, IE8 was enough of an improvement I noted it.

Now obviously that wasn't enough for me to switch, but you are right that the "Oh it is so slow!" crap is disingenuous. IE8 doesn't have support for the new standards, but what it does support it seems to be pretty zippy with.

bias

[smash]

Linux outperformed by windows Vista! or "Vista fastest web operating system!"

Seriously though, any idea why Chrome is faster on Vista, the most maligned, stereotyped as slow OS there has ever been? Would also be keen to see OS X results.

Re:bias

[Sycraft-fu]

'Cause Vista's not as slow as people claim. I've never seen any evidence, either in my testing or online, that Vista ran programs any slower than XP. Most of Vista's slowness rep came from two things:

1) Lots of messing with the disk, particularly on boot. Vista wanted to cache a ton of shit in memory, probably to aggressively, as well as other stuff. Could lead to a system being sluggish to respond to users when it first started.

2) People running it on crap hardware. Vista has a much higher minimum bar than XP for good performance. You really want a dual core and 2GB minimum for a nice system (as opposed to a P4 and 1GB being fine for XP). Lots of people had older systems, tried the new OS, and got mad because it didn't work well. Duh. Newer software needs more resources.

So it doesn't surprise me that a pure app test worked fine on Vista. It was never slow at that.

Re:bias

[Billly Gates]

On my laptop I have noticed a huge performance increase with Ubuntu compared to Vista running netbeans, open office, and Firefox. You are right its mostly disk. However disk access is the number one bottleneck on modern pcs so that is very important.

The problem is Windows loves to load a million services at once and the disk can only handle so much when it boots.

You should try running your win32 apps on Windows7 with the same hardware as vista? You will notice quite a difference. Also the slower processors and the 1 gig of ram are in again thanks to netbooks and the recession we are in. Windows 7 is really nice ... except for the 3 app limit in the default installations.

Re:bias

[smash]

Cheers for the response and for the record I agree. I run/ran vista on plenty of hardware and yes on anything that was purchased with a decent spec in 2004 or so, it is fine.

My post was more taking the piss at the /. majority who rant on how shit vista is, and how "it is year of the linux desktop!", only to have it outperform Linux on tests like this.

Yes, its only 0.002ms or whatever, but it steal beat linux on that test :D

Re:bias

[Rogerborg]

Newer software needs more resources.

Windows 7 needs more resources than Vista? Duh.

Look, Vista was a festering pile of diseased dogshit. You know it, I know it, Microsoft knows it. There's simply no need to defend it, especially when the "defence" runs to "Well, if you run it on monster hardware, it's not as slow as you think."

The nightmare is over, man. Just let it go.

Re:bias

[Raptor851]

2) People running it on crap hardware. Vista has a much higher minimum bar than XP for good performance. You really want a dual core and 2GB minimum for a nice system (as opposed to a P4 and 1GB being fine for XP). .

Uhh...how exactly is that supposed to prove that vista isn't slower than xp? The OS itself is dog slow on identical hardware...we're downward directed to deploy vista to all workstations 10 minutes ago at my work and we're having to upgrade the hell out of or buy entirely new machines just to get the same level of usability we had before... If we want to go that route though, solaris 10 is WAYYY faster than windows xp or vista... i run it on 8 spark 64 processors with 256 gigs of ram, it's way faster than my old P4 box running xp!

Re:bias

[pandrijeczko]

I can admit to never having used Vista.

But I have noticed on the back of pretty much all of the boxed PC games at my local Game store that the each game's requirements now quote differently depending on whether you're running XP or Vista - and the difference for Vista is usually an additional 0.5GB of memory plus a slightly faster CPU.

So it does suggest that Vista has considerably more overhead than XP.

Re:bias

[master_p]

Newer software needs more resources if it offers more functionality or it is badly written, and I don't see more functionality in Vista/Win7...

Re:bias

[delinear]

It's also possible that Chrome is optimised for Windows as that's the majority share OS - it's where all their benchmarking is going to show up in the marketing metrics for how Chrome is so much faster than everyone else. They likely didn't spend so much time optimising the Linux port because it only had to be fit for purpose.

On a side note, Vista takes almost three minutes to boot to a usable state on my intel core 2 quad core q6600 (overclocked), 4GB desktop PC with a moderate amount of software installed (mostly web development and design tools, apache, a few benchmarking tools, etc). Meanwhile my core 2 duo laptop with 3GB and pretty much the same software installed boots Win7 in around 25 - 30 seconds (when I previously ran XP on the desktop, boot time was probably a minute and a half). It's purely anecdotal I know, but for me Vista is incredibly slow - especially when doing anything with lots of little files.

Re:bias

[dbIII]

It still doesn't run well on current machines and never will no matter what happens to the hardware.

The main problem is the memory floor before you actually run anything is far too close to the memory ceiling that can be addressed by 32bit Vista (some other MS 32 bit systems don't have that problem - eg. some versions of MS Server2003). That means that a machine with the maximum memory that 32bit Vista can support is still horribly slow in a lot of circumstances and there is no way to fix it while keeping 32bit Vista. A fast CPU won't save you when Vista is busy swapping memory to disk.

Re:bias

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the biggest reasons in the apparent jump in performance from Vista to Win7 was MS fixing the ungodly GDI problem that Vista had - there's a fairly thorough write-up about it here http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/04/25/engineering-windows-7-for-graphics-performance.aspx

Essentially, GDI in Vista scaled in a square/cube fashion with each new object taking up memory in both system and graphics memory - a double whammy for any machine with integrated graphics which hammered the memory bus and, if you didn't have enough memory, your swap file as well. Cue loads of machines slowing to a crawl with the usual excuse that they're "not powerful enough" for Vista. This was untrue - we had a couple of Vista workstations at work (needed 64bit) with 8GB RAM and if you open enough windows you'll still exhaust your memory.

Thankfully they fixed this for Win 7 and you can now boot in on a machine with 1GB of RAM and run it quite comfortably; the minimum I've managed to get Vista to run nicely in is 1.5GB with some tweaking (this was a friends laptop that was sold with vista and... 512MB of RAM, the poor lass. Took 15minutes to bot).

Executive summary: Vista was a bloated piece of crap.

Posting anon cos I've already modded this thread.

Re:bias

[delinear]

In my experience Win7 seems to require fewer resources than Vista - I can't ever imagine Vista on a netbook, but 7 does a nice enough job, and you might not consider all that graphical "bling" to be functionality but it has an overhead (and the Win7 implementation is much better than Vista's was).

I'll let Penny Arcade sum up my Win7 experience to date.

Re:bias

[jonadab]

> I've never seen any evidence, either in my testing or
> online, that Vista ran programs any slower than XP.

My limited experience with Vista suggests that it *starts up* slower than XP when you first turn it on.

Like XP, Vista goes ahead and displays a picture of your desktop several minutes before it's done doing all of its startup chores, so users who have just turned on the computer are tempted to believe that it's up and running and ready to use... but it's not. I'm pretty sure Microsoft added this "optimization" as an answer to complaints that earlier versions of Windows took too long to start up, but it's the opposite of progress. Windows now takes even longer to start up, but it shows you a non-interactive picture of the desktop while you wait just to tease you.

The only way to tell when it's really ready to use is either to keep clicking on things (which makes it take even longer and eventually lands you a whole bunch of unnecessary open windows) or to hover over certain parts of the would-be UI and watch the mouse pointer to see when it quits showing the hourglass/spinner/whatever wait pointer.

If someone doesn't understand this (and I can tell you for free that most end users don't get it), they could easily draw the conclusion that Vista is slower overall, because it makes them wait longer. Of course, that's not really program startup time they're waiting on; it's OS startup time. But many users don't understand the distinction.

These same users also often leave the load-at-system-start widgets turned on for a bunch of programs that no way ever should be loading at system start, so that exacerbates the problem even further for them. They're not just waiting for Windows; they're also waiting for Adobe Reader and Java and a bunch of other stuff that they don't use at all nine days out of ten, but it's starting up time they turn the computer on anyway.

Other systems (Debian, for instance) also take longer to start up than XP, but once you see the desktop, it doesn't take very long after that to become fully interactive. So it's easier to see the distinction between OS-startup time and UI responsiveness once the system is fully started.

If you turn a Windows computer on and go do something else for fifteen minutes and come back, it'll feel more responsive. That's true for XP as well as Vista.

Re:bias

[pandrijeczko]

Wow! But is it possible to be a virgin in two things simultaneously?

Re:bias

[Alphanos]

Wait, what?

First you say that Vista doesn't run programs slower than XP. Then you say that Vista requires a faster processor and more memory than XP to keep up, because newer software needs more resources. How do you imagine that these two statements can coexist?

Re:bias

[DragonWriter]

Seriously though, any idea why Chrome is faster on Vista

Because Chrome was first released for Windows and the Windows version is the most mature version?

It wasn't until quite a while after Chrome was released that there was any official Chrome for Linux, and it was fairly recently that that was on anything but the dev channel.

Re:bias

[Sycraft-fu]

Win 7 isn't any faster for apps that I've noticed. I used Vista a whole lot and use Windows 7 currently (since Windows support is my job). Win 7 itself is certainly more responsive. On good hardware, it is even more responsive than XP. So the system is ready to go faster and so on. However when you benchmark an app, I find they run the same speed.

So yes, user experience is much better and I highly recommend Windows 7 (7 also scales to lower hardware better, though not as good as XP). However that isn't the same as how fast an app runs which was the original question here.

Re:bias

[mcfedr]

'Cause Vista's not as slow as people claim. I've never seen any evidence, either in my testing or online, that Vista ran programs any slower than XP. Most of Vista's slowness rep came from two things:

1) Lots of messing with the disk, particularly on boot. Vista wanted to cache a ton of shit in memory, probably to aggressively, as well as other stuff. Could lead to a system being sluggish to respond to users when it first started.

so it was slow? just to clear that up, ok there was a reason, but all that caching did actually make it slower

2) People running it on crap hardware. Vista has a much higher minimum bar than XP for good performance. You really want a dual core and 2GB minimum for a nice system (as opposed to a P4 and 1GB being fine for XP). Lots of people had older systems, tried the new OS, and got mad because it didn't work well. Duh. Newer software needs more resources.

New SOFTWARE needs better hardware, yes, that is the case, sometimes, but a new operating system is not the same as new software, the OS is there to allow other programs, the software that people actaully want to use, to make the most of the new faster hardware, not use it all itself.

Re:bias

[msimm]

Can we stop calling the paid Windows 7 public beta Vista?

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[advocate_one]

shouldn't have done the hacks, should have just put up a browser incompatibility page... you know, like ie only sites do for firefox users telling us to upgrade to Netscape 4...

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[Anonymous Coward]

And people who are tired of flash dominating the web, yet performing abysmally for video.

Re:Graphics

[macshit]

I'm still a bit pissed-off that such a change would be made, unannounced, to people like me that actually pay for their services. This is a bit angrifying.

Why? The buttons are small, not particularly intrusive, and useful for people that use those services -- and as they're very popular, that's a lot of people.

If you don't use FB/twitter, or don't want to link to slashdot stories from there, then don't click the buttons.

Yeesh...

IE8 x86 vs 64bit?

[DigiShaman]

Has anyone compared IE8 x86 vs 64bit with this benchmark? If so, what were the results?

Re:IE8 x86 vs 64bit?

[Rockoon]

The x64 version of IE is an afterthought. For example, last I checked IE8(x64) still didn't work with Windows Update.

Some browsers (such as Opera) do not have 64-bit versions for the Windows platform. This is to be expected for many reasons, such as (a) browsers do fine with the amount of memory that a 32-bit process has access to (b) 32-bit plugins can't be loaded into 64-bit processes (c) any sort of javascript compiler (IE doesnt have one, but..) would require both a 32-bit and 64-bit codegen due to the incompatibilities.

The 64-bit version of IE is essentially just a "me too!" compile. Last I checked on XP, IE8-x64 still didn't even work with Windows Update, and required that you close the 64-bit version and run the 32-bit version.

Re:IE8 x86 vs 64bit?

[TheRaven64]

And one extra one: Win64 is an IL32P64 platform, unlike just about any other system you'll ever use. Lots of developers assume that sizeof(long) >= sizeof(void*) because, although the standard doesn't guarantee it, it's true basically anywhere. Except Win64. Even if your code already ran on half a dozen 64-bit platforms, there's a good chance that porting it to Win64 will break things. Most x86-64 systems are I32LP64. A few other architectures tend to be ILP64. When you port code to a 64-bit platform, you generally have to remove assumptions that pointers and ints are the same, that ints and longs are the same, and that ints or longs are 32 bits. When you port code to Win64, there's another assumption that may trip you up.

Re:IE8 x86 vs 64bit?

[atamido]

x64 IE doesn't support 32-bit plugins, which is normal for x64 browsers. The reason Windows Update doesn't work in it is that Microsoft hasn't gotten around to making an x64 version of the Windows Update Plugin. There are almost no x64 plugins (e.g. Flash) so x64 IE isn't terribly useful.

Still, the OP had an excellent question, and someone should check it out (assuming the test doesn't require a plugin).

Re:IE8 x86 vs 64bit?

[wbo]

I doubt Microsoft will ever release a 64-bit Windows Update Plugin because in Vista and later Windows Update is a standalone application that does not require or use Internet Explorer. The only users who may benefit from such a plugin would be those running XP x64 and Server 2003 x64.

Re:IE8 x86 vs 64bit?

[atamido]

Agreed. Although I am curious how users of Server 2003 Itanium update their systems.

Re:IE8 x86 vs 64bit?

[DigiShaman]

Except for the HAL, I would think 64bit updates should be cross compatible between x86-64 and IA64 versions of Windows.

Re:IE8 x86 vs 64bit?

[atamido]

I do know that I've seen WSUS updates for Server 2003 have the 32-bit, x64, and Itanium versions. I haven't paid attention though to see if there is always a separate update for it.

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[Radhruin]

I think what info we've released publicly with IE9 is promising. New and vastly improved javascript engine, hardware accelerated rendering, lots of new standards support (and we're highly active in ECMAScript v5 and joined the SVG working group). Oh, and did I mention, we now do rounded borders?!

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[maitai]

I don't know, I ran their benchmark in IE8 and got 382ms, so not sure how they got 4000+. Their benchmark though.

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[LingNoi]

Since more and more things are going to use Canvas it doesn't matter how IE8 gets supported,

correct

just that it does since its the most common browser out there, and how it performs in those cases.

Incorrect. IE8 isn't the most common browser in any graph I have seen however that is irrelevant (see below).

You're an idiot if you write IE as a web developer

I'm not even sure what you're trying to say here. Either way not writing a site specifically for IE doesn't mean you're disconnected from the real world. There are lots of reasons not to.

If none of your visitors use IE then it's not a priority to support it. If you're doing a demo showing off the canvas tag in HTML 5 then not supporting IE8 isn't going to bother anyone.

Your biggest problem is that you have fallen into the trap of thinking worldwide usage == my website's statistics. Worldwide common browser usage means nothing if 90% of your users are on chrome or Firefox. You sound like an amateur for not mentioning the basics such as target market, user requirements or even analysis of usage statistics of an existing website.

Re:Graphics

[Toonol]

It feels a bit like not being able to turn off the "astrology" tab on your Yahoo home page. While it doesn't actively HURT you, it's unpleasant to have it in your face, and it would be nice if the site gave you an option to turn it off.

(I haven't look at my yahoo home page in a year or two, though, so maybe they eventually fixed that.)

Firefox 3.5 outperformed Firefox 3.0

[Billly Gates]

SuSE OpenLinux had an old 3.0.7 version of Firefox while Vista had a newer version.

Firefox 3.5 has a totally rewritten javascript engine from scratch. It uses some dynamic tree mathmatical aglorithms to perform operations many times faster and has support for javascript functions mapped in ram before execution. Vista used Firefox 3.5 while SuSE had Firefox 3.0.7 installed without the new javascript engine. Firefox 3.0.x was a ram hog compared to 3.5 too.

I also imagine Safari would execute on MacOSX much better than Windows since its designed for it. Itunes is kind of proof as it sucks on Windows.

Re:Opera?

[BikeHelmet]

A year ago I experimented with HTML5, and made (you guessed it) a Tetris clone, which took advantage of Canvas elements.

I noted that when drawing entire images, it was all very fast. Drawing a frame took about 12ms in Firefox and Opera. (limited by the precision of the timer)

Then I tried combining all the images into one, and drawing a region from the tileset. Talk about slowdown! Wow! Separate 64x64 images blitted fast, but as soon as it was dealing with a 512x512 image, the time to render jumped to about 500ms.

I did some quick pixel math and concluded both Opera and Firefox must've been making a copy of the entire tileset every time I tried to blit a region from it. It's the only thing that added up. When I boosted the size to 1024x1024, it jumped to over 2000ms for a frame. Completely ridiculous! ;)

Perhaps someone else could chime in about whether this bug has been fixed? Note: I was blitting from Image elements to Canvas elements. Canvas to Canvas always worked fine for me.

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[Achoi77]

IE should not have even been tested - it does not support HTML5 canvas elements!

Indeed it doesn't. A lot of the hacks involved to get IE to support canvas is merely an emulation of canvas using VML.

I've experimented with a bunch of sprite based animation stuff on canvas, and have seen similarly terribly poor results on a bunch of versions of IE using the code google wrote. (I'm assuming their benchmark is regarding the rendering sequence) Might as well create <image> tags, and animate the image tags with some style manipulation using js, because functionally what the hacks are doing to make canvas work on IE. (This is not regarding tricks to speed up the rendering, such as recycling DOM elements, which is cheaper than creating new DOM elements *shrug*)

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[Achoi77]

Man, I should have read the article. FTFA:

Note that the implementation for Internet Explorer 8 does not use the HTML5 canvas element, because this isn't supported. Freeciv.net implements a canvas-replacement using DHTML and divs with clipped background-images. Therefore the test results are not directly comparable with the other web browsers.

That's what I get for not reading the article :-(

Re:Graphics

[Endymion]

in stylish or usercss or whatever:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document domain("slashdot.org") {
  .share, .sharebar {
    display: none !important;
  }
}

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[VirexEye]

Or maybe they will define the lowest common denominator of standards support through their market share. Again.

Coherence?

[renoX]

Amusing so Vista is as good as XP for running programs but it need much more powerful hardware(!).
Don't you see a "small" contradiction/incoherence in your post?

Re:Coherence?

[iainl]

The point is that a system specced to run Vista or 7 well, will do it as fast (or faster) than it will XP.

Using the obligatory car analogy, when faced with a small, bumpy and twisty road, it's perfectly possible to drive a hot hatch faster than a GT that would leave it for dust in better conditions.

Re:Coherence?

[crazycheetah]

Where the OS is the road? Well, then Vista must be the small, bumpy and twisty road... might be fun for a drive, but what if I run only applications that match the GT and not the hot hatch? Well, then that's just bad. And the hot hatch could probably go faster in the better conditions as well than when faced with crap conditions. So, I think I'll stick to the OS that is the "better conditions".

Re:Coherence?

[TheRaven64]

No, it's a question of scalability, which is often more important than raw speed. With some systems, they perform well in relatively restricted hardware, but the performance improvement when you add more does not scale linearly with the extra RAM, CPU, and so on. With others, you get more constant overhead, but better scalability. Think of the overall performance as constant overhead + scalability load * resources. With XP, it sounds like the constant overhead is lower (which makes sense, as it had to run on 200MHz chips), but the scalability load is higher (which also makes sense, because it wasn't designed for 4+ cores and 2+GB of RAM).

Or, to put it another way, if XP gets 80% of the maximum theoretical performance out of a 200MHz Pentium with 128MB of RAM, but only 50% of the maximum theoretical performance from a 2GHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM, while Vista gets 50% and 70%, respectively, what the grandparent said would be true and contain no contradictions.

Various things in modern operating systems are optimised to take advantage of lots of spare RAM (for example, aggressive pre-fetching of data from the disk). Splitting services up into concurrent tasks has more overhead from context switching, but lets you scale better to multiple processors. Older desktop operating systems treated RAM as a very scarce resource and were heavily optimised for the single-CPU case, because hardly anyone had more than one CPU.

Re:Coherence?

[Lord Ender]

Wait--if his post confused you, what are you doing on slashdot? I hope you don't work in IT!

He said that Vista (the OS) requires more minimum resources to run well, but applications don't run slow on it.

Modern operating systems do memory management, task scheduling, and a bunch of other things. So long as you have the resources to run the core OS functions, Vista and its apps will perform great.

Imagine two databases, on requiring 900GiB of memory and one requiring 1100GiB. It is quite possible that the later uses much faster algorithms, but the former will outperform it on a system with 1GiB of RAM, as it would not incur the performance penalty of using "virtual RAM" (disk-swapping). On a system with 2GiB, however, the one with the higher minimum resource requirement will smoke the other one.

Re:Coherence?

[iainl]

No, the hardware is the road, the OS the car. 7 has much higher minimum specs to get an acceptable performance than XP, but once you've got a powerful enough box it's much nicer.

Re:Opera?

[zwei2stein]

I'd expect them to help out.

It is kind of bad for pr when performance test of all popular browsers do not include yours because it won't run in it (and in it alone)...

Slow vs. Old

[Pedrito]

Wow, that benchmark makes IE look almost as antiquated as the game Civilization.

In Excel, no less!

[KlaymenDK]

Space Invaders, Monopoly, ... oh my.
http://gamesexcel.com/games-excel-vba.html

Re:In Excel, no less!

[jonaskoelker]

gamesexcel.com

I think they might have some of the same issues as that Expert Sexchange site.

Re:In Excel, no less!

[DJ Nathan V]

Lame, compile fails on x64 Office. Looks neat though.

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[selven]

I think the IE management is still living in 2005 with their 95% market share and want to leave HTML5 in the dust.

No Mac benchmarks

[XxtraLarGe]

I wonder how the game would run on Safari (or Chrome or Firefox or Opera for that matter) on the Mac vs. Safari on Windows 7? I'm sure with a few tweeks for Mobile Safari, FreeCiv could become a favorite on the new iPad.

Re:No Mac benchmarks

[Joe Tie.]

Everything involving heavy js and canvas that I've tried on my iphone has been sluggish to an unusable extent. On the other hand, I haven't tried it in a while. So I suppose it's possible some improvements have been rolled out.

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[peragrin]

um no it's not. I have to use IE 8 every day and it is slow. The kind of click to open in a new tab walk take a sip of coffee and and then I can use the computer again slow. It's page rendering isn't bad but that is offset with browser lock ups when trying to open more than one tab at a time. In safari, firefox, and even chrome, I can read one webpage and open up a bunch of tabs from it. in IE8 loading one tab in the background is enough to halt the whole computer interface for a couple of seconds. It has been that way since IE 8 was installed off a fresh windows install.

I am tempted to install chrome or firefox at work even though I shouldn't.

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[Chatterton]

you can see them implementing some HTML 5 functionality as a contest of whom piss the further. But I prefer to see it as a testbed of HTML 5, seeing what work and what doesn't to improve the actual draft of the HTML 5 spec. A lot of the spec in HTML 5 are in because of the implementation done by Mozilla, Opera and Chrome of these specs.

Re:Graphics

[Rockoon]

Wait a moment.. you are a Yahoo user who is complaining about slashdot including two small iconified links to Facebook and Twitter on a couple of profile pages?

Well shit.. don't that beat all.

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[cbhacking]

Sounds like a major step up. I hadn't actually seen any info on IE9, but if you say it's released publicly I'll take a look. Better JavaScript will definitely be very nice, as would SVG, but I do hope that canvas, at least, is supported too.

Any idea when a beta will be available, for MSDN subscribers or otherwise?

Digg?

[Katatsumuri]

It's uncanny valley effect. Digg button is missing.

Freeciv.ORG

[Lord Satri]

The summary and the freeciv.net main page (I'm sure it's somewhere else but that's my point) doesn't mention this: it's based on freeciv.org.

(also strange; the freeciv.org site only mention freeciv.net in their 'community news', not 'project news', so it really seems "distinct projects", they're not officially promoting the other option, yet?)

How many decades late?

[Waccoon]

...using the latest HTML5 web standards

Amazing how long it's taken to get a freakin' frame buffer.

Cue a zillion Web 3.0 marketeers about how the web browser is the OS of the future. Oh, and the iPad is really keen-o, too.

HTML5...

[crazycheetah]

This isn't HTML5-specific, but um... writing about newer browser technology as Slashdot gets upgraded into even more web 2.0 greatness (or horribleness, if that's your taking). Really? Facebook and Twitter links? And I may have easily missed it happen some time ago, but moving around the "slashboxes" on the right is not something I noticed until just accidentally tripping on it right as I saw this thread...

Take this positive or negative... fact of the matter is, I've not decided yet...

Sl-sl-sl-slashvertisement!

[RichiH]

That being said, it's FreeCiv! Of course I signed up.

Re:Graphics

[TheRaven64]

Some of us like Slashdot because it's a place where we can find people with a similar interest in open systems to debate. Having every story contain a link to a walled garden is a slap in the face. I heard that Taco was unhappy with the direction the new owners were taking the site in; maybe he should think about setting up something that's a bit more true to what Slashdot used to be about.

Re:Open up the IE6 renderer code

[Cederic]

Far easier is to run XP with IE6 in a virtual container on the desktop PC, providing support for the legacy estate while permitting new systems to be introduced using modern browsers.

Although less elegant, less secure and less fun than your approach it does have the advantage of being already possible and easy to roll out by a corporate IT department.

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[Andreas Mayer]

Oh, and did I mention, we now do rounded borders?!

That's nice. What about gradients?

FreeCiv vs Civ4

[moonbender]

I started playing Civ4 last week for a couple of games -- it runs very well in Wine, incidently -- and I'm wondering how FreeCiv compares. Obviously the graphics aren't there, but after a couple of games that seems less and less important. The gameplay mechanics are what matters, and I think they work very very well in Civ4. And is the AI any good? Wikipedia seems to imply that diplomacy is a bit simple.

Anybody got "in-depth" experience with both games?

Re:FreeCiv vs Civ4

[watanabe]

FreeCiv is buggier, less pretty and focused around Civ1/Civ2 rulesets.

It's also hackable, and super cool, and I like it.

But, you aren't going to enjoy it if your first Civ is Civ4 -- Civ4 has a huge number of 'improvements' (to me, they are improvements) over Civ1/2. Add in the graphics quality, and if you've got it running well, I'd say you should just enjoy yourself. Of course on debian, you could probably sudo apt-get install freeciv, so it wouldn't be too particularly hard to check it out for yourself. : )

Re:FreeCiv vs Civ4

[moonbender]

Civ4 isn't my first Civ, I think I've pretty much played all of them, particularly Civ2 and Civ4. It's been a while since I've played Civ2, though, so I'm sure returning to those rules will be very odd. Was Civ2 the one where decommissioning units would gain you production in that tile's city? I remember rushing wonders that way.

Re:Graphics

[Luyseyal]

I've been using Lite Mode for years and years. This stuff never bothers me and it's reading /. the way god intended.

-l

Complete standards like XHTML and SVG

[tepples]

Building to modern published (complete) standards is the only real way.

XHTML 1.0 and SVG 1.1 are "modern published (complete) standards", yet not even IE 8 supports them.

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[hufman]

How is neckbeard an insult? Are we seriously starting to discriminate based on the pattern of someone's facial hair? Wow...

Inner platform as a sandbox

[tepples]

so what do we do with all the extra power? We rewrite games we played many years ago on top of so many layers of abstraction that they're no longer playable

Sure, an inner platform reduces efficiency. But it also acts as a sandbox to prevent the program from destroying or disclosing your personal documents or making permanent system changes that degrade your user experience outside of a given application. For instance, a few versions of PHP a while back had a "safe mode" that (among other things) limited a PHP program's file system reads and writes to a given folder so that it could not affect other unrelated applications running on the same server.

It's a driver problem

[tepples]

The main problem is the memory floor before you actually run anything is far too close to the memory ceiling that can be addressed by 32bit Vista (some other MS 32 bit systems don't have that problem - eg. some versions of MS Server2003).

Intel 32-bit CPUs are capable of addressing more than 4 GB of physical memory, but a lot of device drivers aren't properly aware of this. 32-bit editions of Windows Server support more RAM because they have a separate driver certification process.

Re:It's a driver problem

[dbIII]

That's true, they've only had since the Pentium Pro came out to deal with it. 32bit Vista is an extremely bizzare beast where plenty of old drivers were broken but the memory limit is around 3GB to be compatible with others. I suppose it's hated so much because of all the "Longhorn will do everything" hype when the reality was much less useful than XP for many situations. IMHO the only area where it works is if you have a lot of memory but wouldn't normally need it. The nasty hack of using USB drives as virtual memory wasn't enough to fix it.
By now the 64bit versions of Vista and 7 should have decent driver support so there is little reason to be on the 32bit version with all of it's problems.

Re:It's a driver problem

[tepples]

By now the 64bit versions of Vista and 7 should have decent driver support so there is little reason to be on the 32bit version with all of it's problems.

Unless you have 16-bit apps you still need to run, and you don't have a copy of Windows 3.1 to run in VirtualBox. Or unless you have hobbyist hardware that doesn't have a signed driver because the author isn't a partnership, LLC, or corporation.

Re:It's a driver problem

[dbIII]

In those case I use XP, Win2k, or in cases where legacy A/D cards required it Win98SE.
I see little point in 32bit Vista and had already wasted far too much time with it's quirks before MS Win7 came out. I think I did about six or seven XP installs on Vista laptops that never should have had Vista on them in the first place (low hardware specs). The only Vista machine that remains in my workplace is a 4GB laptop that is only used for email and web browsing.

The change was due entirely to user frustration and not any sort of policy. You can't throw even a full 4GB at the problem to solve it so you have to try something else.

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[wbo]

Based on your description I doubt the problem is with IE 8, rather I suspect the problem is with a mis-behaving browser plugin. New blank tabs should open nearly instantly and each tab loads in a separate thread

For instance, the Sun Java SSV Helper plugin for IE tends to cause a lot of the problems that you are describing including taking 3-4 seconds to open new tabs at times. I have no idea exactly what the Java SSV Helper plugin does but I have yet to encounter a Java applet that won't run without it, so I just disable it.

I have also seen the Adobe PDF Link Helper plugin cause problems (although the latest version of Adobe Reader 9 appears to have fixed most of those problems.)

Try starting Internet Explorer using the No Add-Ons shortcut and see if you still have problems. If performance is improved then you can launch IE the normal way and go to Manage Add-Ons and try disabling add-ons one by one until you find the ones that are causing problems.

Low-cost subnotebook PCs

[tepples]

With XP, it sounds like the constant overhead is lower (which makes sense, as it had to run on 200MHz chips), but the scalability load is higher (which also makes sense, because it wasn't designed for 4+ cores and 2+GB of RAM).

Which explains why Microsoft had to keep Windows XP around until it could severely cut the constant overhead of Windows NT 6.x. Otherwise, low-cost subnotebook PCs with specs closer to the former than the latter, like an ASUS laptop with 512 MB of RAM, a 900 MHz Celeron, and a 9" screen, would have been unable to run Windows. That's Microsoft's biggest weakness: "unable to run Windows" means end users might find out that the alternative isn't as bad as Microsoft makes it out to be.

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[ClosedSource]

Isn't it great that HTML5 is making hacks like Flash obsolete .. oh wait.

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[ClosedSource]

No, they're living in 2010 with a 60% market share.

Unless HTML5 outperforms Flash it's not likely to be the reason for anybody to switch. Anybody who hates MS or Flash has already switched, right?

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[ClosedSource]

The typical user doesn't give a rat's ass about "product X dominating the web".

You don't get it

[ClosedSource]

"IE8 isn't the dominant IE browser yet. Drop IE8 support and offer the IE6/IE7 users a chance to go to another browser."

Companies want to have as many people as possible view their site. They don't care if their web developers don't want to support IE. There are plenty of developers out there that understand the golden rule: "those with the gold, make the rules". That's why they call it "work".

Re:You don't get it

[Jason Earl]

IE may be the most dominant browser (not by much), but Windows users have a wealth of available browser options. I can imagine lots of scenarios where iPhone support (for example) might be more important than supporting Windows users that can't or won't install another web browser.

Which is why, of course, that Microsoft is starting to pretend that it actually cares about web standards. The executives at Microsoft aren't stupid. They know that installing an another web browser isn't that difficult. Heck, most home users have already switched to something else. If IE falls too far behind, then IE will simply be replaced by something else.

I thought...

[benj288]

http://totalmound.com/xfdaoqb

Nice straw man

[ClosedSource]

I seriously doubt that any developer is writing a new application that requires IE6.

Even if they were major MS fanboy (is there such a thing?), there are much better Windows-specific tools today than there were in 2001.

Re:Nice straw man

[dbIII]

I seriously doubt that any developer is writing a new application that requires IE6.

It was released last month (still called the 2010 version) and our accounts staff are using it.
The crap MSDOS shareware mentality still pervades the MS application developer community. You'll find a lot of big haystacks full of "strawmen" if you look around. It is a real problem not just one I've made up.

Re:Nice straw man

[ClosedSource]

Does calling it the 2010 version mean that this a new version of an existing application? Or is this truly a brand new app?

If it is brand new, it isn't representative of Windows application developers.

Re:Nice straw man

[dbIII]

It is shifting an app from a purely crappy MSDOS client/server approach that still manages to run on XP to a purely crappy IE6/web server approach.
It's not unique in the stupidity stakes. The number of things that need to run as Admin are astonishing.
You may be looking at it from the end of a well run development shop with a small number of apps - however I'm looking at it from a client end with an enormous range of apps many of which are utter crap that would not survive as shareware.
A lot of the development community appears to be stuck in 1999. I even got a Y2K bug in the 2008 version of Macrovision's flexlm for MS Windows. There is also stupidity like things to modify the licence on a USB security dongle in 16bit code to run under MSDOS - how does such a thing possibly happen? MSDOS should have been long forgotten before these USB devices even came out (stuck with parallel port dongles until 2007).

Re:Nice straw man

[ClosedSource]

It sounds like your management if f***'d up. Of course, I don't know enough about the context in which these decisions were made to be sure.

Re:Nice straw man

[dbIII]

Are you really trying to blame my management and myself for the mistakes, poor judgement and incompetance of people in different companies and most likely on the other side of the world?
You are completely wrong, it sounds like the management and developers at a lot of software vendors is f*d up instead. Don't try to blame the user for the utter crap sold to them which is not as good as advertised.
For example, we choose the software, and those that produce the software choose to use Macrovision crap to prevent us from pirating it in a situation that serves to only punish the honest, and we get a Y2K bug in 2008 that kills all the permanent licences for a couple of WEEKS.
Blaming the messenger so that you can pretend that your industry is perfect is pointless. If you haven't seen the enormous piles of crapware that are in use then you know very little about how the MS Windows platform is used, so please stop pretending that the problem does not exist.

Re:what the fuck?

[clone53421]

AdBlock Plus:

slashdot.org##span.share

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[clone53421]

I’m using IE 7 and even with add-ons disabled opening a new tab takes about 1 second between hitting Ctrl-T and it displaying the new tab with my cursor in the address bar, ready to type. It’s annoying as hell.

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[Jason Earl]

The typical user will care when IE won't play the games that they want to play or view the videos they want to see.

The fact of the matter is that the web has constantly evolved since the day that the first hypertext was invented. Up until very recently Microsoft was trying to push developers in the direction of Silverlight. It wanted to see the web evolve towards being Windows-centric again.

However, Mozilla, Apple, and Google (and Opera, I guess), have all decided that what they really want is for plugins to go away and for the browser to simply become a better client. This apparently resonates with some developers. Removing a reliance on formats like Flash or Silverlight definitely has some advantages. You can get a modern web browser for most any platform these days, Silverlight and Flash are much harder to come by.

So, while it is pretty clear that Freeciv.net is out out on the bleeding edge, it is also pretty clear that this sort of web browser usage is something that Microsoft needs to pay attention to. After all, it is not like it is particularly difficult to replace IE with something else. Windows users have a multitude of browser choices. At some point I would imagine that supporting iPhone users with a HTML5 client makes more sense than supporting folks that can't (or won't) install another browser on their Windows PC.

Re:Opera?

[clone53421]

Well, I suppose they could have probably made the IE hack work in Opera... with a similarly abysmal performance which would unfairly reflect on Opera, since Opera does support the canvas object and they just couldn’t get it working.

Re:Graphics

[clone53421]

I added this AdBlock Plus filter as soon as I noticed them:
slashdot.org##span.share

Re:Graphics

[pipingguy]

Note: I am a subscriber and pay to not see ads.

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[Ant P.]

If being a final standard counted for anything, we wouldn't need gigantic workarounds like jQuery to emulate a sane event model in IE. We'd have DOM2 which was standardised eight years ago.

Then again if we waited for the W3C to standardise anything useful, we'd better be ready to solve problems that occur in the meantime. Like the heat death of the universe.

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[ClosedSource]

"The typical user will care when IE won't play the games that they want to play or view the videos they want to see."

You're right if you replace "will" with "would" and "when" with "if". Where's the evidence that everybody's going to drop flash and embrace HTML5? Having the browsers support it is necessary, but the key player is the money guy who foots the bill for the websites - is he going to see a bottom-line advantage in rewriting the existing sites to be politically correct?

One more thing

[ClosedSource]

If Mozilla has decided they want plug-ins to go away, they better get on it - Firefox is the most plug-in centric browser there is.

I don't know, you can imagine quite a bit

[ClosedSource]

I can't imagine that iPhone users will outnumber Windows users anytime soon. Besides, I thought the iPhone wasn't supposed to require any special support on the server side to allow browsing.

Re:Graphics

[Toonol]

As I said, I haven't checked it in a year or two. The only thing I ever go to Yahoo for because one of my long-term email addresses is through yahoo.

However, I just double-checked, and it's still there. If you have the "personal assistant" enabled, which gives you a brief summary of recent email, weather, stocks, etc., it will also display astrology, and there's no option to turn it off.

It's a weird thing for a company to do. They would be aghast at the idea of displaying a tab on "Christianity" or some other religion and giving no option to turn it off, but force a much more ridiculous astrology tab.

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[Simetrical]

IE8 actually works pretty damn well for much of the modern web; it's far from the fastest but it's fast enough for most, it is compatible with CSS2 and the other standards most web developers still use, and it has fixed most of the issues that people have cursed at IE over for so long. However, it has very little support for new standards - its CSS3 is still limited, and as far as I know it supports no HTML5 at all.

It supports some HTML5 features, e.g., localStorage. But many fewer than other browsers: multiple competitors already support video, audio, canvas, various new form attributes, and much more.

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[Simetrical]

Firefox 3.0 doesn't support HTML5 either, but they've included that in the test, and it performs a lot better than IE8.

Firefox has supported <canvas> since 1.5, so it was perfectly fair to include 3.0.

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[Simetrical]

Worth pointing out that HTML5 isn't a standard yet. It's still in draft for the next couple years.

Canvas is at last call at the WHATWG. Look at the little tags at the side: "Last call for comments". This means that the WHATWG (a standards organization) believes that part of the spec is stable and is asking for implementations.

Canvas is also a de facto standard. Gecko, WebKit, and Presto have all implemented it more or less interoperably for an awful long time now: Firefox since 2005, for instance.

You are correct to say that HTML5 is not yet a W3C standard, unless you call Working Drafts "standards". But the W3C is not the only standards body out there.

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[Simetrical]

IE8 is sure not slow for most web browsing. I messed with it recently before deciding to go back to Firefox and it displays normal web pages noticeably faster. In either case we are talking like a second or less, but still. Most websites out there, IE8 was enough of an improvement I noted it.

Now obviously that wasn't enough for me to switch, but you are right that the "Oh it is so slow!" crap is disingenuous. IE8 doesn't have support for the new standards, but what it does support it seems to be pretty zippy with.

Tip: compare a fresh IE8 profile to a fresh Firefox profile. If you're comparing pristine IE8 to Firefox with all your history and bookmarks and extensions, then yeah, no kidding Firefox will be slower.

Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual

[ajlisows]

IE 8 is better, but it is still annoying. With each increment you get to pile on more !--[if IE 6]!-- !--[if IE 7]!-- !--[if IE 8]!-- type stuff. It does have some decent features though. The "Developer Tools" built in are actually pretty decent. I can open it up and not be instantly hit by a malware drive by. I still avoid it in favor of Firefox unless I have absolutely no choice.

Re:Opera?

[badkarmadayaccount]

Maybe the browser decompresses it again instead of blitting? Different framebuffers, etc.

Obligatory XKCD

[jonaskoelker]

See also http://xkcd.com/676/

Re:Opera?

[hkmwbz]

Browser sniffing was involved, it seems. It might still be bad PR for Opera because of all those clueless people out there who assume it's Opera's fault even when it's the site that's blocking it, though. Weird how people can't seem to write cross-browser code even today.

Re:Opera?

[zwei2stein]

Not at all. It IS Operas fault.

Opera is supposed to follow standarts. They do exist for reason.

Not writing "cross browser" code is browsers fault: If browsers did not each implement their own version of standarts, it would not even be necesary.

In fact, it should not be standart to write "cross browser" (ever noticed for buzz-wordy this sounds?) code, users of broser that does make it pain to develop for should end up with link to download browser that actually works. No-one should ever have to use jungle of css and javascript hacks to pick slack for bad browser.

"Weird how people can't seem to write standart following even today."

Re:Opera?

[hkmwbz]

Actually, the fact that Opera has to spend far too much time emulating bugs in other browsers in order to work is not Opera's fault at all. That said, Opera is one of the most standards-compliant browsers there is, so that's clearly not the issue here. In this case it's apparently browser sniffing, or the author decided to rely on bugs in specific implementations rather than following the standards.

Re:Opera?

[zwei2stein]

In this case, It is IEs fault (sigh, again)

My apologies to Opera devs.