Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
This post is proof that there is no lower age or lower intelligence limit on who posts on Slashdot.
Why is Snark Required?
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.
After Mosaic, it's been all downhill.
HRH The Duke of Windsor
Sparkbrowser, unlike Internet Exploere and Firefox has every feature that is needed on the control panel, Sparkbrowser tracks your clicks, and search preferences to give you a better more personalized browsing eperience.
If you are weary of your privacy and believe that sparkbrowser has invaded your privacy, you probably should have read the terms of use before you downloaded it.
At least they are upfront about it but since there is no "do no evil" pledge, I will have to pass.
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 can also be poorly-coded websites.
The BBC's news page used to have an annoying javascript news ticker that ran across the top of the page. As it ran it built a slowly larger and larger array of something or other and memuse would slowly creep up. When I stopped having that as my home page my ff memory problems stopped.