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Mozilla Unleashes the Kraken
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has released the first version a new browser benchmark called Kraken. Mozilla's Robert Sayre writes on his blog, 'More than Sunspider, V8, and Dromaeo, Kraken focuses on realistic workloads and forward-looking applications. We believe that the benchmarks used in Kraken are better in terms of reflecting realistic workloads for pushing the edge of browser performance forward. These are the things that people are saying are too slow to do with open web technologies today, and we want to have benchmarks that reflect progress against making these near-future apps universally available.' On my somewhat elderly x86_64 Linux system Google Chrome 6.0.472.55 beta completes the Kraken benchmark in 28638.1 milliseconds, Opera 10.62 completes it in 23612.4 milliseconds, and the current Firefox 4 nightly build completes it in 19897.5 milliseconds."
Shame it only benchmarks one small part of the browser - Javascript.
ways suspicious when someone releases a benchmark that shows that their software is better than others, especially when other benchmarks have shown FF as slower than Chrome or Opera. I hope this isn't one of those M$ style tests that find the bits that their own software does well and others badly and test that.
It's still running.
Its not like only MS and Mozilla as browser vendor released their own benchmark in with their product is doing good.
Besides, whats so bad about it? Ain't it obvious they are gonna include in their benchmarks stuff that they feel is important and as a consequence - made it good during browser development?
It just shows that other browsers than FF lack in some areas, with might - or might not - be important.
Well... Mozilla _has_ concentrated on low RAM usage in the past. The actual memory usage of Gecko is significantly lower than its competitors if you load some pages and measure it.
At this point, they're actually trading off space for performance (e.g. making some core objects slightly bigger to improve certain performance characteristics).
One of Mozilla's longstanding issues with some of the other benchmarks is that they test toy problems that take longer to set up than to run. Yes, that favors browsers with JS engines that set up for execution quickly, and that portion of the engine is important. It doesn't show the real speedups for intensive applications in the browser, though. Optimizing the slow parts is the priority of most people right now, and getting the application set up a little faster at the beginning isn't as big a deal unless you have a lot of small scripts in one page.
An earlier blog post by Sayre and some of the comments to it display some of the issues.
It's still running.
Laugh all you want but I have had it running on IE 8 (Windows 7 64 bit) for the past 5 minutes and it is still stuck at the first stage. So I think we have a legitimate reason why Internet Explorer was not included...
Also got a warning that "A script on this page is causing your web browser to run slowly."...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
For this particular Slashdot page right now, with both browsers opened fresh for it, Firefox 4.0 beta 6 uses 23 megabytes less resident memory than Chrome 5.0.375.125 does. It also uses about 1800 megabytes less virtual mapped memory, not that that matters nearly as much, but it's a big number in difference.
Epiphany 2.30.2 uses 11 megabytes less residential still, but about as much virtual as Chrome.
Galeon 2.0.7 uses about the same residential memory as Firefox and about twice as much virtual.
Midori 0.2.6 uses 5 megabytes less residential than Firefox, and about 1850 megabytes more virtual.
Arora 0.10.2 uses about twice as much residential memory as Firefox, and about twice as much virtual.
Dillo only needs 11 megabytes to render the page, but that doesn't have JavaScript and only shows a handful of comments without being able to get more.
Fennec 1.0 uses about the same memory footprint as Firefox 4.0 Beta 6, despite being the small-device Mozilla browser.
What is your exact complaint about Firefox's memory use? Are you still experiencing the huge memory leakage and growth from the 2.0 series?
Google wins in their test! (that curiously heavily exploit recursion and other good parts of the V8 engine)
Microsoft wins in their tests! (that curiously heavily test only DirectX acceleration)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Have you considered that it may well be the other way around?
If Mozilla, Google, MS, Apple or whoever truly believe that those particular aspects of a browser are the most important, doesn't it make sense that they would optimize their browsers for those aspects? I think it makes sense that they would write tests for the exact same aspects that they have been optimizing their browsers for, -because- they believe these are the key aspects.
Lacking an objective measure, all you can do right now is decide with whom you agree the most and probably use their browser or another browser that ranks well on their test - if these benchmarks are a critical decision factor for you.
My browser's performance has always been "good enough". Can we talk about ergonomy, reliability, compatibility, please ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
The major browser Javascript engines (with the apparent exception of IE) are all now within the ballpark of each other. And they all make slightly different tradeoffs and are optimized for slightly different conditions, and have all released benchmarks that illustrate the strong points of their browsers.
If you look at v8bench (Google's Javascript benchmark), sunspider (the Webkit Javascript benchmark), and now Kraken (Mozilla's Javascript benchmark), you'll see that the latest browser versions are basically within 5-30% of each other on identical hardware. Which one comes out ahead depends on whose set of optimization parameters you think is most important.
Attacking Mozilla for doing the same thing every other major browser maker does (not that your post was, but other posters have) is silly.