Slashdot Mirror
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."
I'd like to see Chrome 7 results in there...
I have been thinking about using Chrome for some time, it seems faster and already has a respectable community around it. But I also would like to avoid google stuff and I'm already used to Firefox, not sure if it is worth the trouble.... Any opinions?
I must say that I have pretty much totally switched to Chrome. FF 3 and 4 are really dragging my system down, and often fail to load sites I depend on (gmail passwords are now randomly rejected in FF, but work in any other browser).
I've had the prebeta for 7 for awhile, and it scored over twice as well as 6 did on Kraken. I would have liked to see them test that, especially since 6 did a little worse than 5 did for me.
Yeah, I just ran the test myself, and I went from: FF4b6: Average FPS: 14.388 JS Time: 10.667ms Frame T: 57.500ms FF4b7pre: Average FPS: 24.841 JS Time: 1.683ms Frame T: 38.568ms This is on a 5 year old HP prebuilt (Core2Duo @ 1.86 Ghz, 2 GB DDR2-533, etc.)
Your comment doesn't really apply. Microsoft is the only company with enough balls to ignore certain aspects of Acid 3 that aren't official specifications of HTML/CSS/JS.
(gmail passwords are now randomly rejected in FF, but work in any other browser).
Yeah, that would be the phishing malware screwing with you.
I use Firefox and IE regularly, have played with Chrome, and occasionally use Safari on the Macs at work.
I honestly can't notice any difference between any of them in rendering speed.
99.99% of the time, web browsing performance is network-limited anyway.
Surely standards support and browser stability are more important features, at least on platforms with more grunt than an iphone?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
You are just getting old. There are distros that do the same as 5 years ago, you just don't care about "freedom" anymore, not now that you can afford a Mac.
Linux on the desktop is farther than ever after selling its soul to proprietary software.
A regular user doesn't use Linux without nVidia, Adobe and a DVD player. They are encouraged to do so as well. They grow in an environment where using proprietary software is acceptable and the only reason to use a free alternative is that it costs nothing.
Old corrupted people like you will assert that using the shortcuts allows for more free software to be used, but the fact is like you people will leave the boat after justifying that they can also use free software on MacOS X or Windows 7. An Ubuntu memory space is mostly filled with proprietary crap anyways.
Switching to Mac only highlights your elitism as the reason to use Linux in the first place. Anyone with any technical knowledge would know that Windows 7 is the best OS hands down, both in technology and in features. If I was to sell my soul to the devil I would certainly buy a Windows 7 machine. The only thing worth MacOS has is Objective-C.
submitted it to Bugzilla
Test case + bug #, or it didn't happen.
Okay, so it's entirely possible that you ran across a bug, but absent us actually looking at the particular bug and seeing how relevant it is to how many users, it's hard for us to judge how "fair" it was for the bug to have existed but not been fixed since 2005.
Or are you going to tell us that every bug found in Mail.app since 2005 has been fixed? (if Apple even has a public bug tracker and never redacts it...)
coding is life
Actually, these results look very similar to the ones the WebKit guys (both chrome and safari teams) publish. They're almost always saying chrome and safari are similarly fast in the lead, firefox lags slightly, and IE8 is way slower... These are the same results as here. It just appears that IE9 is now added to the pile, and added at the top.
So what have we learned
1) Mozilla are good at lying about benchmarks (actually, we already knew that, they've been claiming the next big firefox release would be faster than everything for a while now)
2) IE9 is quick
The question is... is IE9 correct. I'll take works correctly but takes time over doin it rong quickly any day.
I'm not sure how they get off calling this a "real world benchmark", as it seems to bear almost no resemblance to what people normally use web browsers for: "The benchmark works by simply dragging a part of the diagram around the page for five seconds." WTF?
It certainly doesn't seem to be any more useful than the other browser benchmark being touted these days, and arguably it's much less useful, because it measures a single very narrow aspect of browser operation, one which has little connection with typical browser usage.
Moreover, the slashdot summary seems to go to great lengths to emphasize how "badly" FF4 did on this (useless, remember) benchmark, and to pump up IE9: "The results were surprising. IE9 held its own pretty well (with a few caveats), and the latest Firefox 4 beta came in dead last" -- but if you actually look at the results that emphasis is misplaced: almost all the browsers were quite close to each other, with a few outliers, but in no cases was FF4 an outlier, and indeed was pretty much identical to IE9 (on this test).
The only clear result I can see is: When doing a certain very specific type of javascript rendering, most modern browsers have pretty much identical performance, though chrome's particularly fast, and IE8 particularly slow.
Of course, that isn't very interesting to anybody except LucidChart users, of course, nor very likely to generate any controversy...
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Gmail is an example of a "nearly everything is javascript" type of an app. More and more, people are adhering to such a philosophy, similar kind of application development is gaining lot more traction. This has had some interesting effects for e.g. people have started building things like Aves Game Engine. Going forward, being performant/efficient in areas such as rendering might become crucial.
I guess what I am trying to say is "This may not be the real world of today, but it could be the real world of tomorrow". Does it justify the tests as being critical at this point? Meh, no! All it says right now, is chrome can do some shit better than firefox, but in my opinion firefox still has time and dedicated userbase to play catch up (or move beyond). Hopefully, it wont end up being our next IE.
Really, fuck it. I've had it with corporate-sponsored dick-fighting contest about which browser is the fastest. I really, really couldn't care any less. Features, openness, security, standards compliance, yeah. But If I want a fast app, I'll go native, thank you. Maybe I'm too old, but I've always thought HTML sucked as a programming paradigm. As an information distribution mechanism, sure. But for interactivity? Please. It's about time somebody called bullshit on this. Hell, a goddamn Visual Basic app from fifteen years ago kicked the butt of most modern web sites in usability, performance and ease of maintenance. The only thing that makes the web so attractive is the barrier to entry : free, nothing to install, immediate access to the average brains of millions. Just like TV. No thanks for dumbing it down to this. And now you wanna make it faster? Piss off. Go write real code that does something, not just another abstraction layer.
-- Home is where you eat your heart out.
no bug is too obscure if you're willing to fix it yourself.
I once found a bug in the de-facto standard framework for Delphi and Borland C++ Builder internet communication.
It was a simple bug; the dates in SMTP headers used a locale-specific time seperator, ':' in most locales. In Italian locales (and undoubtedly many others) it's '.'. It should always be ':' since that's what the relevant RFC states.
I found the bug, wrote the patch, tested the patch, submitted the patch, explained the problem and one-and-a-half years and a couple of tries later... it still wasn't in the official release. At that point I gave up. It was an open source project, but you couldn't get access unless you wrote major contributions; a one-line bugfix isn't major.
So being willing to fix bugs isn't enough if the project team is a bunch of arrogant douchebags.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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?
Which browser do you use? Most security companies have ranked Firefox, and Safari, as having far more security vulnerabilities than IE for quite some time.
One of many (JFGI): "Firefox most vulnerable browser, Safari close second": http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=8489
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?
Well, that's more specifically why you dropped IE 5.5 and IE6. By the time you get to IE8, these aren't really issues and Firefox has traded its early security-consciousness for usability. And it looks from those charts that IE9 runs pretty fast. That lines up with my own experiences of the beta. Though it's worth keeping in mind that the IE9 is a beta so it's not 100% fair to draw conclusions until it goes to release.
The most interesting things in the article aren't in TFS, though. One is that javascript processing is now apparently so fast that it's dwarfed by the time it actually takes the browser to render an updated page. Another is that in order to get the results from Firefox that they did, they actually had to drop a number of anomalous results where it ran vastly more slowly for unknown reasons. I'm not surprised as Firefox has been getting fatter and fatter ever since 3. The third is that Chrome blows everything else out of the water. They used an old version of Opera which is a shame as I have the newer one and my anecdotal impression is that it's snappier than the previous one so it would have been worth using the latest Opera. But still, Chrome apparently renders far faster than both IE9 and FF. I'd love to know why. Is it just that it's a new project designed from scratch without the cruft that other browsers come with? Does it lack support for significant functionality? Has there been a lot of low-level optimization?
I think in a years time, the real battle is going to be between IE and Chrome. Even today I mainly only use FF for web-development due there being some excellent development add-ons for it that IE can't compete with. Opera is a nice general browser and my default, but its cookie management is shit. Much of FF's funding comes from Google, who I presume would want to push Chrome and who I guess fund Firefox as a means of keeping Microsoft from re-establishing browser-dominance. But that may not be sufficient reason to really push it to be the best it can be, just to keep it "good enough".
I don't wish to be disrespectful to the FF developers. I know how complicated a code-base that size is and they're to be commended on producing a browser that serves well. But it's become a big, unwieldy beast in comparison to the leanness of Chrome and the new IE.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
The prevalence of firefox has helped the security of IE considerably, for a number of reasons...
Before they started losing market share, MS had no intention of improving IE at all.. Also now that no browser has over 90% market share they become far less attractive targets for malware authors, who instead now either target specific areas (eg ie6 is still huge in corporate settings) or other software which has a huge market share (adobe flash/pdf, msoffice).
So long as there are a handful of browsers out there competing with each other.
Were it not for firefox, ie7 would be a slightly warmed over ie6, and would still be getting attacked on a daily basis and users would have nowhere to go.
Incidentally, those benchmarks show ie9 coming in 3rd from last, only firefox 4 beta (by a small margin) and ie8 (by a huge and laughable margin) are slower. Actually released browsers such as firefox 3.6, safari 5, chrome 6 and opera 10 are all ahead of both betas of ie9 and firefox 4.
Now as for why the firefox 4 beta is slower than 3.6, it could be compiled in a debug mode (as betas often are), its new javascript engine has only just been integrated and needs tweaking etc...
The fact that current beta versions of both ie9 and firefox 4 are way behind current non beta versions of other browsers is rather poor, and you would hope that both will be fixed by the time their final releases come around.
As for Google, they make their money from the web and generally don't care which browser you use to access it, so long as that browser is fast enough to deliver a reasonable experience and standard enough so it doesn't force them to spend a lot of time kludging around. Older versions of IE were a threat to google as they made their web based apps appear slow, new versions appear better however IE is still controlled by google's biggest competitor who, given the chance, would use it against google in any way they can. When it comes to firefox/opera/chrome/safari i doubt google really cares which you use.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
You can't simply count the number of security vulnerabilities reported in each browser. You need to consider the severity of the vulnerability, whether it was exploited by black hats, how long the vulnerability was known by black hats before it was patched, and whether the browser vendor is admitting to vulnerabilities that were no publicly known when they were fixed. The problem with IE is that they take the longest to fix vulnerabilities, and they are the browser most often targeted by black hats.
Besides, these days plugins are attacked more often than the browsers themselves, so keeping plugins up to date and turning on features such as DEP may be more important than which browser you use.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
And on this very site the exact article you linked to was dismissed as being pro-Microsoft FUD.
You are kidding, right? On this site everything remotely positive to Microsoft is routinely dismissed as pro-Microsoft FUD and paid astroturfing.
Not that it will matter, but here is another report, this time from Secunia: http://blogs.computerworld.com/report_firefox_is_the_worlds_most_vulnerable_browser
and a newer one from Secunia: http://www.infoworld.com/t/browsers/internet-explorer-deemed-least-vulnerable-browser-593