Slashdot Mirror
Google Confirms Chrome GPU Acceleration
An anonymous reader writes "Google is already experimenting with GPU acceleration in its latest Chrome developer builds. Chrome 7 can separate different layers of a webpage into CPU and GPU processes and combine those layers using the GPU as long as the browser is now launched with certain switches. Chromium 7 has also a new Labs feature that reveals that Google is thinking about moving tabs from the top of the browser to the left side. It seems that Chrome will be catching up with Firefox 4 and IE9 in terms of hardware acceleration soon."
These days most screens are wider than they are taller. And text still reads better vertically.
So the height is valuable real-estate while there is side space to waste.
My desktop has the application bars hide on the left/right.
The more vertical space the better.
You know, I keep hearing this, how Flash keeps crashing browsers. I use quite a few Flash sites ranging from casual games to management applications for security appliances, and I think I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times I've had a Flash related browser issue over the last couple of years.
I think it's either a tired meme or some people just don't know how to setup and maintain a stable system.
Have been in there a long time, hidden by the --enable-vertical-tabs switch, so this isn't a new idea. Try it out yourself if you want (about:labs page isn't in yet so you'll need the switch).
Nah, just keeping the tradition of taking stuff from Opera; life as usual. ;)
One that hath name thou can not otter
The problem is that in order to keep Flash from crashing you pretty much need to run flashblock or noscript which cripples your browsing experience and unfortunately there are sites out there that actually try to obfuscate their javascript and Flash content to trick you into loading their annoying ads.
Basically it's a pain in the ass to keep Flash from hogging resources so most users just don't do it even if they know how to.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Your wife/girl friend (LMAO! A /.er having one!) or maybe a sister playing those god forsaken, crappy, waste of time, Zinga games on facebook. You will know when it crashes (after hours and hours of playing) by the scream that sounds like someone is having their finger nails pulled out. Slowly. And you will have to fix it because you can always fix it. Last time I had to fix a flash game I turned her computer off. I still sleep on the couch.
Why don't they let people choose what side the tabs are on. Look at the windows taskbar, you could drag it to be on any side of your screen, why can't the tab bar thing work like that?
Ok, so that's one data point. The fact that you have not had issues with Flash does not mean that no one else does, or that those who do "just don't know how to setup and maintain a stable system"; to generalize from your experience and draw conclusions about everyone else who claims to have had a problem with Flash is quite the logical fallacy. In fact, I'll counter your anecdote with one of my own -- if you will tell me what I could do to better set up or maintain my system such that this problem goes away, I will gladly buy you a beer.
I use Firefox 3.6.8 on a MacBook as part of my job. I tend to have FF open with several tabs (gmail, reverence pages, test pages for the code I'm working on, etc). I don't close Firefox at the end of the day, as I'm going to open all those same tabs the next day, and although I have the SessionManager add-on installed, it is often unreliable; Firefox will usually run this way for days or weeks. Eventually, however, it will start hogging the CPU (running at ~60% or higher, sometimes all the way to 99.9%), regardless of what tabs are open. Or, it will start spiking up to complete UI lock (even showing the spinning rainbow ball cursor) on a very regular basis -- it may start at once per 5 minutes and last a quarter of a second, but it will eventually worsen to the point that FF is spending more time locked than running. In either case, the only thing that seems to work is to restart the browser. It took a while to determine, but the only correlation I can find with the speed at which these problems show up (and worsen) is the amount of time I let the browser sit on pages containing Flash. Now, unlike GGP, I don't necessarily blame Adobe -- it seems equally likely to me that Mozilla is at fault here. However, the fact remains that my browser gets less stable/functional the more it runs Flash.
So, would you please explain to me how the problem I've described is my fault, rather than Mozilla's or Adobe's? Blocking Flash is not an option, and telling me I should just restart the browser frequently is like a Windows 95 user saying their system is perfectly stable as long as they reboot once or twice a day -- my usage pattern is not the problem, it merely reveals a problem in FF and/or the Flash add-on.
It's true flash is a lot more stable these days, particularly with the release of flash 10.1
Just the odd browser issue here and there:
Like it causes IE to crash very frequently on some computers
http://forums.adobe.com/message/2925919?tstart=0
and Firefox to crash very frequently on some computers
http://forums.adobe.com/message/2962506#2962506
http://forums.adobe.com/message/2920257#2920257
and then of course there was the Safari crashing problems
http://fairerplatform.com/2010/08/flash-10-1-crashes-safari-how-to-remove/
and it crashes some computers with hardware acceleration enabled (the default setting)
and it causes all browsers to crash on some computers when you try to activate a webcam
http://forums.adobe.com/message/3031253#3031253
and of course it crashes chrome a lot too on some computers (also remember the Adobe flash uninstaller doesn't work on chrome now, so need to uninstall in two ways)
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=461f66d507a8d884&hl=en
But I'm sure your right, I haven't for instance seen anyone complain of flash crashing safari on the iPhone. oh wait....
If you want to speed up your browser, just block the following domains:
If you block the top 10 ad services, browsing speed improves substantially. Firefox BlockSite is useful for blocking, or you can edit HOSTS.TXT. This alone will make Slashdot pages load twice as fast. AdBlock isn't enough; it still loads the data, but doesn't display it. There's too much ad code out there which stalls page loading until the ad is served. So you get to wait for the ad servers. Sequentially.
That was half a decade ago, nowadays most marriages don't last that long...
(but more seriously - Opera is for a long time the only major browser without a corporate grandaddy (remember AOL?), probably the only way it could work back then)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Tabs on the left make sense, but unless you have a whole lot of them, tab images make better use of space. They are recognizable even when small, provide feedback, and make for a better click target. Also, for some sites, the text titles are just not useful for distinguishing tabs. (Actually, I would take out the text entirely, and only display it when one hovers over the tab bar--in the complete form next to, and over over the web page.)
Of course, a per window switch would be best, as there are definitely cases where you would want to use text tabs. (Lots of tabs from the same site, etc. )
Another nice presentation for image tabs would be an in-browser expose type interface. It could be implemented much like the Chrome downloads window; just another html page with the images/text, or in your own format entirely.
Today's GPUs are FAST and their power is wasted if not used. What's the harm in harnessing it ? It's not mandatory, browsers will use GPUs if they can, else they will fallback to the CPU. OTOH if you complain about the state of the web in that it requires GPU power to actually provide a faster experience, well partially I feel the same, but then again imagine being able to to all kinds of fancy content without writing one line of C/C++ code. Enabling more people to create. This is going to be awesome!
Google is putting Adobe to shame. The need for GPU acceleration is much greater with Flash and the difficulty should be similar, but Google's done the work and Adobe hasn't. To quote myself from earlier:
The penguin.swf blog is just an endless stream of excuses. Adobe absolutely can accelerate YUV->RGB. It's standard practice in software development to create a special fast path for a common scenario when performance matters. They can fall back to the slow path if the swf is trying to do something incompatible with the fast path.
Anyone writing a flash-based video player would opt for the fast path and follow whatever rules are necessary. But thanks to Adobe's laziness, that option isn't available. Flash is just a dinosaur that doesn't want to evolve.
FYI, here's how to accelerate video: Flash draws the scene in layers, back to front. For alpha blending or anti-aliasing of edges, it must read the RGB value below the layer currently being drawn to blend it with the current color. This is the problem, and there's a fairly simple solution. After rendering a YUV layer, render the layers above to an RGBA surface that starts out 100% transparent. Then send the output layers (RGB below video, YUV video, RGBA above video) to the video card for final compositing. The only scenario where this wouldn't work is if the player uses filters above the video. Have you ever seen a flash-based player that uses filters?
You control the tabs by pressing ctrl-tab.