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How Do Browsers Scale?
An anonymous reader writes "Benchmarking browsers is a somewhat silly exercise, since scores cannot be replicated on a variety of hardware, and it is not uncommon for even the same system to fail to replicate benchmarks scores, especially in JavaScript tests in two succeeding runs. The guys over at ConceivablyTech have an interesting approach, running browsers through multiple tests on different sets of hardware (including an Android smartphone), and showing the scaling differences between browsers when you are using a dual-core netbook on the low-end and a six-core desktop on the high-end. They also tested HTML5 on Firefox mobile and found the browser has better HTML5 support than the current Firefox 4 Beta 6."
Actually the whole "scaling" measurement is pretty much a bogus issue, because at any one time you have the machine you have.
You can easily get another browser but you can't quickly or cheaply run out and get a different computer just to obtain more cores.
Further, the results are bogus (by their own omission) because the one browser that should make the best use of multiple cores (Chrome) was not able to do so because of a flaw in the benchmark in use. When the tool is broken, what is the point of publishing results?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Why not a VM that runs bytecode, and JIT compiling, so your favourite language can be used?
Nope.
The only takeaway you need is:
Chrome 8 had the smallest gain, which, however is due to coding flaw in the Sunspider benchmark that holds back the processing horsepower of the Phenom II X6 processor in general.
Translation: Our results are totally bogus because our tool was broken but rather than fix that, we are just going to shovel these results out there anyway.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
That's NOT low end. Funny how marketing is so skilled in manipulating peoples perceptions.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Another meaningless benchmark that claims to replace all the previous meaningless benchmarks. Yawn.
Wait, what?
Python as a choice of multithreading-enabled language? You are aware that CPython has a global lock and only one thread can execute Python code at once?
Javascript will be more multicore friendly than Python when web workers get widely implemented.
And what's the point of developing a brand new sub-set of python with a brand new interpreter and set of libraries? You might as well just compile python to javascript, there's not a lot of impedance mismatch between them. Python is mostly useful because of its wealth of libraries, other than that it's just a generic dynamically-typed language with a certain syntax.
Is 64 bit versions of browsers. Proper session management. Proper Adblocking. An extension framework. Configurability.
At the moment, IE and Firefox are the only ones with their head in the game. If Chrome and Opera want to get ahead, then fix what lacks.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
I use the keyboard Ctrl plus +/- keys to using the mouse you insensitive clod!
This post is proof that there is no lower age or lower intelligence limit on who posts on Slashdot.
Why is Snark Required?
I hate to break the news to you, but working PC repair I can tell you the average person's desktop is NOT a dual core, but a late model P4 running XP. Why? Because as the PC manufacturers are finding out for the things that most folks do on a PC...going to FB, playing flash games, watching Youtube, etc, a 2.6GHz P4 is spending most of its time twiddling its thumbs. Just add a cheap $30 RAM stick and it'll keep right on purring. Hell the PC I'm typing this on is a circa 2003 1.8GHz Sempron, and for the above tasks it is quite nice, whisper quiet and doesn't heat up my apt like when I'm slamming the quad. And for the above tasks frankly a quad core doesn't really change anything, not enough to notice.
Personally I think this is a failure in the software developers of late. Back in the day developers knew machines weren't getting changed out every year, so they wrote their code to be light and responsive. Now I guess the software developers are sitting there with huge piles of RAM and multicores out the butt and just not bothering with lean or fast anymore, instead falling for the age old "throw moar power at it!" meme. I was kinda hoping when netbooks came out they would change their ways, sadly not.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.