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IE9, FF4 Beta In Real-World Use Face-Off
An anonymous reader writes "Most browser benchmarks are isolated, artificial tests that can be gamed by browser vendors optimizing those specific cases. With only those benchmarks to go on, the folks at LucidChart were skeptical that the IE9 beta would actually outperform other modern browsers in real-world applications. To separate hype from reality, they built their first browser benchmarking tool, based in LucidChart itself. This benchmark is to SunSpider what a Left4Dead 2 benchmark is to 3Dmark Vantage. Product specs don't matter, only real-world performance on a real-world application. The results were surprising. IE9 held its own pretty well (with a few caveats), and the latest Firefox 4 beta came in dead last."
from Linux this month after using Linux since 1993, I think this applies to all of FOSS.
Somehwere around 2000-2006 FOSS was basically head-and-head with commercial software in practical usability and maintainability, with its own distinct advantages and a relatively small learning curve.
Then there was this veer into "if you ever want all the Windows users to switch..." thinking, and in an effort to eliminate the learning curve FOSS threw away pretty much all of its advantages as well. If FOSS is just Windows/Mac OS/IE by another name, why choose FOSS?
Particularly when Windows/Mac OS/IE win on the polish, compatibility, and accessibility fronts by virtue of their being cathedral-built software?
With Firefox slow and cumbersome, Thunderbird choking on Gmail IMAP continuously while Apple's Mail.app sails along happily, and KDE4/GNOME3 being emblematic of the many ways in which FOSS has lost its way, I just decided I'd had enough of the nonsense. I'm ready to be able to walk into Best Buy, purchase any device, and expect that it will work seamlessly with the current generation of computing devices, without options, without Bugzilla (and condescendingly dismissive developer retorts), and without lots of consulting Google to find out how the gconf infrastructure has changed in the last two years or how HAL has been replaced by DeviceKit or policies moved from /etc tree A to uneditable dynamic filesystem B (but just use this easy command line management tool to set options...)
It just plain saves me a boatload of time and headache to use something else, like OS X plus Google apps plus Chrome. The pending desktopization of FOSS has fizzled thanks to the politics of the bazaar.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I'm not sure what is "real world" about spinning a UML box around another UML box in a giant (presumably) canvas-based javascript app.
For me, "real-world" means: is gmail fast enough? is opening a new tab fast? is image rendering fast enough? is html video fast enough? is the occasional embellished html5 animation fast enough? is typing into the address bar fast enough?
I'm sure their diagramming app is cool and everything, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone use anything like it, so I'm not sure what is "real world" about using it for a benchmark.
They even said that they altered the test in the middle to fix IE's performance problem. Come on.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
The way this benchmark measures "intra-frame time" is broken. In particular, it uses a setInterval with a 1ms delay. No browser actually respects that 1ms. Chrome clamps it to 5ms; others clamp it to 10ms, all to avoid the website thrashing the CPU pointlessly.
The upshot is that Chrome's interframe delay in the graph is about 5ms and Firefox 3.6's interframe delay is aboug 10ms. Which this particular benchmark can't tell apart from "no delay at all", given its methodology.
Firefox 4 beta, IE9 beta, Safari, and Opera seem to have delays greater than 10ms, so they're clearly doing some work they can't finish in 10ms.... or have slightly buggy timer implementations. Or both.
Of course in practice frame rates above 60fps or so are pointless since the screen doesn't redraw that often. ;)
On the other hand, on Mac, on modern hardware, I get 4.5fps in Chrome 7 dev on a random trial document I just tried, with JS render tiems on the order of 7ms (with a 7ms standard deviation) and "intra-frame time" of 224ms with a 900ms standard deviation (yes, those numbers are nuts). Firefox 4 beta comes in at about 11s for the JS (with 3ms stddev) and 125ms for the "intra-frame time" (with a claimed stddev of 0, which looks really suspicious).
It'd be nice if there were non-obfuscated source for this benchmark so its number-crunching could be evaluated; that 0 stddev is ... highly improbable.
Me too.
Its odd how both the summary above and the linked article sort of over look the fact that Chrome just blew the doors off of every other browser and the compared the production version to the latest and greatest of the others.
Chrome really deserves top billing, but the story is about the who is going to come in dead last.
Yawn.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
This benchmark can be run by anyone in LucidChart. First, sign up for a free account here.
Nuff said
TFA (yes, I actually read it) says: "Firefox 4.0 Beta 6 came in behind all other browsers except for IE8". That's quite different from "dead last".
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Modern browsers are so fast that the difference is miniscule. If you're looking at using IE6 or using Chrome, then obviously Chrome needs to be praised. If you're comparing several browsers that are all fast enough that there's no strong difference between them in real world use, then mocking the loser is just more fun :D
They forever screwed themselves because they used to charge people to use it. When there's a ton of competition, and it's free? Yeah.
So did Netscape, which eventually turned into Firefox. I don't think that has anything to do with it. Opera has great technology, and no understanding of what most users want in a (default) user interface. They also seem to have no clue that most users never change default settings, so it doesn't matter how configurable it is.
Absolutely. I find it humorous how I will occasionally hear coworkers cursing:
1) The speed of their browsers. "Render, god damn it!" echos down the halls.
2) The ability to quickly switch tasks/tabs within the browser (ie responsiveness vs. speed). "Fucking flash!"
3) The stability of the browser. I don't really care so much if a single tab crashes; I'll just reload it. Someone with 40+ tabs in firefox, however, is stuck waiting a minute or so while whatever they were doing crawls back from the dead. (Users who don't have session management in their browser are even less fortunate.)
Meanwhile, I sit there contentedly working away, not distracted by such things, due to using Chrome and a lightweight window manager on Linux. I only start noticing a slow down when I'm being inefficient, anyway - IE, doing too much at once, getting distracted, and not getting anything done.
Of course, the slow users don't complain all that much, either. Seems they can't quite keep up with much of anything. :P
A little speed in the right places makes a huge difference.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Meanwhile, in the real world, people actually want the source of all their information to be fast. Go figure.
I guess the actual selection of versions shows how the point of the article was more about bashing FF4 compared to IE9 (in which it also failed, given the very small difference between them) rather than doing a honest comparison of all of the browsers.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
I'm not so quick to forget why I dropped IE in the first place. To get away from ActiveX and general apathetic browser security. Where's that represented in benchmark?
__________________________________
Free your mind - Flush your toilet
There are some good things about the web.
Instant updates to all your users at exactly the same time. No more worrying about if your users are using old, insecure, incompatible versions.
For times when users need to be connected to eachother, having everybody go through a standard HTTP server is the easiest way to getting rid of networking problems, not having to worry about firewalls, and not having to expose your users computers to the web.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.