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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."
Beta 7 is waiting for these blockers to be fixed.
Firefox 3.6 scales best across cores
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
Why, oh why did javascript become the defacto client-side scripting language for the browser
If you want to scale horizontally across multi-cores, you need a language that allows easy multi-threading and concurrency
About the only thing JS offers for concurrency is that horrid settimeout function
What we need is a better scripting language
Why not incorporate a Python interpreter into browsers, and develop a stripped down sub-set of python for use on the web
I see no technical issues in doing this, only trying to battle the inertia of JS
I find that Firefox gradually slows down with use, requiring me to re-start it at least once per day to avoid second-or-more delays when scrolling or typing.
So I'd like to see benchmarks that test a browser's speed after several hours of simulated use, benchmarking while many other windows and tabs are open. This can also be done in several different memory-restricted VMs to see how the amount of memory affects the speed.
Perhaps my problem is due to one or more of the plug-ins I use. So Mozilla should make it easy for plugin developers to test their releases on a benchmark like the one described above.
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.
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.
Wouldn't surprise me. The folks doing the development have spent a lot of time working on it and have avoided the temptation to just make each tab a completely different process.
Except their data doesn't actually show that, and Firefox 3.6 has far worse absolute performance than the other browsers. So, the effect they're seeing is probably just the other browsers (including Firefox 4 beta) performing much better, but hitting a wall due to cache pressure and/or IO bottlenecks. Whereas Firefox 3.6 is slow enough that it appears to be scaling well, but really just runs slower than the system can perform.
But that would mean that trolls would have to stop claiming that Firefox is constantly leaking huge amounts of memory and unusably sluggish.
Which is a bit odd, considering how easy it is to be fast when you're not fully featured and how all of those browsers seem to be getting features that Firefox has had for some time now.
Dual core netbook is low-end?
I was surprised by that, too. Dual-Core is my high end, with a PIII on the low end.
Chromium > Minefield on that system, btw.
That's NOT low end. Funny how marketing is so skilled in manipulating peoples perceptions.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I was surprised by that, too. Dual-Core is my high end, with a PIII on the low end.
Cool. So what's the weather like in Uganda, this time of year?
Nope. The only takeaway you need is:
Nothing is as fast as Links.
-and-
Chrome v. Firefox Browser fanboys today are as silly as Atari v. Commodore fanboys back-in-the-day.
-and- :-)
I like Netscape/seaMonkey.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
(checks)
Right now my FF 3.6 is only using 185 megs with 9 tabs plus 1 floating window (radio). That's smaller than what IE8 or Opera 10.5, which use about twice as much.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
P.S.
Of course I don't overload Fiefox with a lot of crap. My only addons are PornZo... er, I mean ImageZoom, NoScript, and 1-click Youtube Downloader. (I used to have WOT but grew tired of false blocks of harmless sites like foxnews,com.) Fewer addons equal leaner memory usage.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
They also tested HTML5 on Firefox mobile and found the browser has better HTML5 support than the current Firefox 4 Beta 6.
Um, yeah. The first beta of Firefox Mobile is based on newer code than FF4b6, which came out a WHILE ago. Beta 7 hasn't been released yet because of a lot of crashes as well as it being considered the "feature freeze".
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Wet with a chance of noisy lines & 24k dialup.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Another meaningless benchmark that claims to replace all the previous meaningless benchmarks. Yawn.
Dunno. But central California is in the 90's.
The PIII has a longer battery life than the dual-core laptop, and much longer than the desktop. ;-)
Otherwise, it'd be in the garage next to the Apple II
No, Links.
Dilbert RSS feed
Hold CTRL and scroll your mouse wheel to scale your web browser...
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.
Yup, I need to know how they perform on a dual hexacore Gulftown!
Heh. But seriously, logging into one of the lab machines makes the dual core laptop feel slooow.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
sparkbrowser is going to be the next web browser for download, if you currently have both firefox and chrome, why do you have both?? Sparkbrowser Uses both Gecko and Webkit Elements for the fastest and best browsing experience, it will be available for download on http://sparkbrowser.com/ in the coming months it is significantly faster than forefox, and google chrome,
Hey, look what happened when they released FF14 before it was ready...
1 word: TRAINWRECK.
Firefox 14? Do you mean Firefox 1.4? I don't even remember that version.
In Soviet Russia, JavaScript FUCKS YOU!
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
This post is proof that there is no lower age or lower intelligence limit on who posts on Slashdot.
Why is Snark Required?
Final Fantasy...
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
the one browser that should make the best use of multiple cores (Chrome)
Since you said "should", I have to say that other browsers should also be able to do that using multi-threading, assuming your reason is because of Chrome's multi-process approach.
Lynx is rather nimble!
What makes you think that somebody who remembers what gopher was would be young? What makes you think that someone who thinks that mixing content with code is a bad idea is of lower intelligence?
If these two posts were all that I were to go on, then I'd be forced to conclude that the GP is older and more intelligent than you. Your UIDs only help to reinforce my conclusion.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
as a long time user of firefox, and for a number of years now, chromium, let me say: chromium appears to work much better than anything else on the low end - largely due to its sane memory utilization when not much is available.
ironically it would appear that chromium/chrome's current limitation is actually one they inherrited from firefox. the cache engine slows firefox, and chrome, to a fucking crawl. ironically, google just took ff's engine and scaled it way out - to the point where it's architectually poorly suited. apparently, this is being fixed - and has been fixed in firefox 4.
Try Links2, now with Javascript and graphics support (no X11 needed, it even has framebuffer support)
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
There's that word again; "heavy". Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the earth's gravitational pull?
(Dr. Emmett Brown, Back to the Future part 1)
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
-and- Chrome v. Firefox Browser fanboys today are as silly as Atari v. Commodore fanboys back-in-the-day.
No, not as silly. With ST vs Amiga, they at least run different software, so there's some sense in trying to advocate the chosen platform. With Chrome vs. Firefox, not so much...
Bah! just you wait till I get my UPS fitted into my back pack, along with my desktop and then a tray kind of like thing for my monitor, keyboard and mouse. Oh wait... you would still beat me in battery life... but mine would some much more awesome!
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
Now 'age' can refer to chronological age or mental development age. Here on Slashdot, as far as I have observed, the mental development age is around 12. I have no idea what the chronological age average is, but I assume that it skews to a younger demographic. Certainly under 40 and most likely under 30. But you can't tell that just by reading what people type.
Take me, for example. I have been programming since 1968, and I have been paid to do it full time since 1974. I have programmed every thing from what used to be called minicomputers (with teletypes and paper tape) and main frames (with punched cards) to what used to be called supercomputers (Cray-1/TM-2 from Thinking Machines). I predate the internet, and I actually remember hearing about the IMP going on line at UCLA for one of the first few nodes on what was then know as ARPA-NET. It is extremely likely that I have been programming longer the you have been alive. So when I hear you say that I must be a newbie because of my UID, it is just another one of those judgment problems that seem to be so prevalent here on Slashdot.
Now take a look at my SIG and if you think about what you wrote you might understand why I chose it.
Why is Snark Required?
I just want my browser to render a large table with hundreds of thousands of rows without having to wait forever.
Well there's dual core, then there's dual core. A regular "pentium" dual core is pretty low end, then there's dual core Atom chips, Core2 Duo, i3, i5 and i7 dual core processors. A Core i7 620M is not the same as an Atom dual core processor, but both are dual core. The number of cores is not, by itself, a good measure of cost or performance at least as far as the dual core processors go.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
Firefox is not full featured when it relies on plugins. Comparing the features included in the base install, Firefox is not highest on the list of features. What I see for comparisons is where people compare the features of Firefox with all possible plugins to the other browsers with no plugins. And then compare the performance of Firefox with no plugins to the others.
I don't think it's a troll to claim that Firefox leaks huge amounts of memory. I have no doubt that there are lots of people running Firefox with that problem. If you are going to claim that a problem introduced by the plugins don't count, then you can't claim the features they add. I don't mind if you do or don't include them, but to list them as features without accepting the problems they sometimes introduce is dishonest. You get them as benefits with their drawbacks, or you don't get to claim them.
Learn to love Alaska
After Mosaic, it's been all downhill.
HRH The Duke of Windsor
Underlying methodology was also curious, to say the least. All the browsers were judged based only on their own improvement when going from slower to faster setup. Well...what if, hypothetically, some browser is already fabulous on the slower one, already close to some ceiling fundamentally limited by factors external to its code? What if some other is absolutely horrible on slower machines and it essentially relies on much faster hardware for improvement?
All the while ignoring huge architectural and clockspeed differences between the two CPUs. With such testing scenario, going from 2 to 6 cores can have a negligible impact for all we know.
Generally, who cares about the improvement on a monster of a CPU? (except for "does getting it make sense at all already? Oh...") That's not what vast majority of people use, shouldn't be targeted, generally isn't and hence provides performance way in the area of "good enough". Performance on real low end, like some machine from 5 (or more...) years ago, is where this makes a huge difference. How well it scales down, how long it remains pleasant and usable.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Exactly.
Well said. This measures nothing useful about the browsers themselves because we are told nothing about current performance. (Although we already know that from other sources).
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
It's a shame they didn't bother to mention what the coding flaw is. If I were to hazard a guess it would be that the flaw is that the test is written to make Safari look good, not Chrome. The V8 benchmark fixes this.
false blocks of harmless sites like foxnews.com
Mostly harmless.
The test makes Opera looks worse than it is, because while they added the brand spanking new Chrome 8, they ignored Opera 10.70, which has been available for some time now. If they can include pre-releases of other browsers, why not Opera? And unlike Chrome 8 which seems to be slower than the previous version, even these unfinished builds of Opera 10.70 are noticeably faster than the latest stable version.
Clever signature text goes here.
Links? Did you mean Lynx? Seriously, if you are going to start your argument frofrom there I see no point in continuing, since you seem trapped in the prior century.
Epic Fail.
Or Epic Redface?
Or Epic Pie-on-face?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Huh ? the 8080 could adress only 64k
You had quite a setup then...
So, what was it again with the previous effort at mobile Mozilla, its abandonment and "we'll wait for the hardware" (which is finally getting there in a very small portion of the market), while some other engines are happily running on mobiles for years and being available on a vastly broader spectrum of phones?
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
Yeah, I know, but this place isn't exactly for the "average person", and a PIII is pushing it anyway.
I mean, I don't run top-of-the-line hardware myself, by any means - I'm still on "Pentium Dual Cores" processors with DDR2. And my father and sister are using computers that I've given up on because they were too slow. But a PIII? Really???? I would expect better from a /. nerd :)
"Wet with a chance of noisy lines & 24k dialup."
Oooh, Baby, that's what I like to hear.
He seemed to mean Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_(web_browser)
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Actually depending on the OS a P3 can be quite enjoyable. Look up "TinyXP Beast Edition" and you'll find a version of XP SP3 that not only has a more modern look (last I played with it they had a Vista Black theme, but heard they were going win7) and gadget support, but actually runs quite well in the base configuration with a 600MHz with 128Mb of RAM. I know because I ran it for awhile with a P3 I had lying around. The only thing that wasn't snappy was flash, which see my "throw moar power at it!" above for THAT problem. And I'd say running a custom stripped won OS is pretty geeky, wouldn't you?
Plus you have to remember the guy is talking about a laptop here. what do folks do on a laptop? Check the mail, surf the web, write and edit docs. All of those things could be done on an OS like TinyXP with cycles left over. This just proves what I've been saying about software developers. There is A REASON why we have the old saying "What Intel Giveth MSFT Taketh away" and it isn't just MSFT, whom I have to give credit for making Win7 a hell of a lot less resource using than Vista, but it is ALL developers. Why should a fricking Office suite needs hundreds of Mb of RAM, when you aren't using 1/10th the features? why are browsers sucking moar and moar RAM? It is because the developers are sitting on some 12 core monster with 24Gb of RAM and frankly just aren't seeing the problem.
That is why I think we need a "real developers care about the environment" initiative, where all you have to do to be a member is show your code scales down to where it runs well on a 1.5GHz Celeron or Sempron. This would show that not only was your code well written enough to run on anything from a netbook to the latest multicore, but would stop pounding the resources and contributing to eWaste when machines that folks are otherwise happy with can't run your code. Adobe I'm looking at YOU!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Which is why developers should show some restraint and NOT use the latest hardware to develop on. Use it to test the final product, sure, but keep the main development cycle and especially any dogfood phases on older hardware. You will end up with software which works fine on older spec hardware. It will fly on newer boxes.
--frank[at]unternet.org