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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."
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.
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?
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.