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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."
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?
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.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
The iPhone is not quite fast enough : /
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.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Worth pointing out that HTML5 isn't a standard yet. It's still in draft for the next couple years.
Indeed. I found the comments more interesting than the article.
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.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
'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.
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?!
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.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.