Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
The scary bit is that the world is quickly moving in a direction where serious desktop applications will be written in... Javascript.
So much for Java, .NET ; as soon as its possible to earn money through the Google App store for your Web app there will be a torrent of these applications being release to the world.
The web browser is the new platform.
It feels like going back 20 years in time.
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.