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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."

4 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Conclusion: Firefox 3.6 scales best across core by icebike · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
  2. dual-core netbook on the low-end? by nurb432 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That's NOT low end. Funny how marketing is so skilled in manipulating peoples perceptions.

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  3. Yay bench by kangsterizer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Another meaningless benchmark that claims to replace all the previous meaningless benchmarks. Yawn.

  4. Re:Need a better client-side scripting language by rantomaniac · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.