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The Latest Web Browser Grand Prix
An anonymous reader writes "The latest browser benchmarks are in... again. This is one of the better 'browser battle' articles, though. Chrome 13, Firefox 6, IE9, Opera 11.50, and Safari 5.1 are put through 40-some tests on both Windows 7 and Mac OS X Lion. As a PC guy, I was pretty impressed with the performance of Safari on OS X, and the reader feature looks awesome too. The author also uncovered a nasty Catalyst bug that makes IE9 render pages improperly and freeze up under heavy loads of tabs. The tables at the end pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of each browser, which is nicer than a 1-10 or star rating. The tests are more thorough than most browser comparisons I've seen."
There is only one important question; Does it run Noscript?
Seriously, not a single clue in TFS tells you that the submitter is the author of TFA ...
Safari 5.1 on OS X on my 2.26ghz C2D laptop starts up, loads, renders and navigates pages notably faster than any other browser does on my unburdened Win7/64-system that runs a 3ghz C2D. While there is a thing or two that makes me prefer Chrome, Safari under OS X is definitely the absolutely fastest and swiftest browsing experience around.
Windows 7:
1. Chrome
2. Firefox
3. IE9
4. Opera
5. Safari
MacOS (Lion):
1. Safari
2. Chrome
3. Opera
4. Firefox
Safari on MacOS is almost as fast as Firefox on Win7.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Chrome and Firefox both use Adblock, for the record. Chrome doesn't have "noscript," but it does have alternatives that work well.
it's an advert for views from toms hw, so the article is laid over 17 pages. chrome "won" on windows and safari on osx.
i'm going to say again that the reason why google created chrome was to get a browser that doesn't have adblock for googleads by default. the 40 tabs test is stuuuupid, I reckon it just tests if the browser does some lazy loading or not.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Weird I seem to have Adblock and NoScript on Chrome, and on Firefox as well.
Honestly, do so many people have such a slow computer that they have to care for such minor speed differences?
I use Firefox because it has so many extensions and plugins. With just a few additional Firefox extensions installed I'm able to run TOR at the click of a button, block Flash selectively, block referer URLs, block Javascript selectively, block "Like" buttons and crap like that, delete cookies and Flash cookies, block Google analytics, control SSL certificates and being warned of bogus ones, and so on. Unfortunately, such functions and tools are essential nowadays. Not to speak with all the non-privacy related plugins available.
Look at the computer from the next casual person you have? You'll notice that they're using 5% of their RAM and 2% of their cpu(s).
If only. Try firing up Firefox with 10-12 tabs and see it slowly, but steadly, eating you memory up. A browser is one of the many apps i run on my systems, so good peformance and memory handling has a definite impact on my user experience.
Agreed
The only things I care about
General:
Stable
Personal:
Layout
Plugins
Applies standards correctly
Professional:
Restrictions
GPO availability
What, you mean Safari? I'm running both adblock, and a JS blocker there.... 'nuff said.
is that it works on Tom's Hardware articles.
http://chromeadblock.com/
http://safariadblock.com/
Yep, definitely no adblock there.
No testing under Linux ... like it is 1999. And this is on supposedly geek site? Meh.
If they'd mentioned the add-ons then they should've run the test with a few installed; my guess is it'd make firefox's performance even worse.
I am trolling
Does the AdBlock really work yet or does it just hide the images once they've downloaded?
No sig today...
Firefox 6? C'mon! I'm already on Firefox 7! Oh wait, hang on, there's an update for Firefox 8 now. Or should I go with 9 beta? Eh, 10 should be released tomorrow, right?
EFFICIENT add-ons are more valuable than tons of DUMP so-called add-on.BTW, Firefox also runs on Linux based OS
No idea, but I don't see the ads so I it seems to function just fine regardless of what method it uses.
It's hard to use the computer when you find up the damn browser is eating half of your 4 Gigs of RAM :) I like Firefox overall, but they really need to start addressing their memory management issues.
If only. Try firing up Firefox with 10-12 tabs and see it slowly, but steadly, eating you memory up. A browser is one of the many apps i run on my systems, so good peformance and memory handling has a definite impact on my user experience.
Fire up 10-12 tabs and chances are you have multiple instances of Flash bogging down your computer. If not flash then you still have 10-12 DOMs, 10-12 JS sessions with random timer events, image animations and so forth going on in the background. I think Firefox should probably ship with something analogous to a Task Manager where you could see how much CPU each tab "consumed".
I don't even blame Flash for the problems of CPU consumption. Flash gets a lot of hate but its really a victim of its own success. Any piece of code which had so many instances running would hog CPU.
Yes it matters. There are usability studies that show people will wait X seconds (not sure of the exact number) before they close the page and give up. If a web browser is faster, it's going to make more page views and if you are a business that makes more money when people use the web more (like Google), then it matters.
It's a bit sad they haven't tested betas of Firefox, IE and Chrome.
E.g. Firefox 7 includes some memory usage optimizations which could easily halve its memory usage under the stress test Tom's Hardware guys carried out.
I imagine a test designed by Microsoft to make IE look good might have also been designed to hit Firefox's weak points. Maybe it's slow at that demo, but it works great for my daily browsing. What else should I care about as far as speed goes?
I usually get along using way less than that. For example, this is my (crappy) desktop at work, right now...
EFFICIENT add-ons are more valuable than tons of DUMP so-called add-on.
Yeah, and a browser that has the right features in the first place is more valuable still.
BTW, Firefox also runs on Linux based OS
And? So do most of the browsers they mention.
I am trolling
For the average user who has more RAM and CPU cycles than what they know what do with; does it matter that a page will load in 1sec or 2sec? Seriously, 99% of the consumers won't care.
Amazon found that a 100ms delay decreased sales by 1%, Google also found similar results where an artificial increase in page loading time decrease the number of searches users performed. So it appears that users DO care, at least at an unconscious level.
Also, you're partly missing the point of faster browsers. As browsers get faster & more advanced, web developers will find interesting ways to take advantage of that extra power and capabilities and deliver more compelling user experiences (look at 3D on the web with WebGL, or ultra low latency two way communication with WebSockets for example). Unless you're one of those Web Luddites who thinks the web should just be black text on the white background with the occasional image.
I mentioned Firefox specifically because i can open a crapload of tabs on other browsers without these issues. I've posted a pic of my workstation upper in the thread, where Opera is shown behaving very nicely in these situations.
Again, i like FF a lot. The developers seem have started addressing these issues since version 6, but still, i keep finding out it leaks memory like crazy after a while.
What about the people that are going to be running ARM tablets? The browsers on those use the same rendering engines as the desktop counterparts, i.e., Webkit, Gecko, and Trident. And the javascript engines are the same as well. We need those engines to be as efficient as possible to eek out better and better battery life. Obviously, this benefits smartphones as well. The entire world doesn't revolve around the desktop.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
You don't really think facts and rational thought are welcome here do you? This is Slashdot, we'd much rather go for the easy populist +1 by criticising every little thing whether it actually improves our lives. After all, what you propose amount to change. And we can't have that now can we?
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Nope.
NoScript is good. I prefer PrefBar. Single-click browser-wide (and in some cases, per-tab) activation/deactivation of images, cookies, Java, Javashit and Flash. Idiot webmaster does browser-sniffing based on User-Agent? Forge it with a single dropdown. Don't like some asshat web designer's choice of red text on a blue background? Heck, you can even turn off "colors".
True - but Flash probably is the memory hog here. I have an instance where I don't even have it installed (really!), and Firefox 3.6.20 has never taken more than 700MB even after weeks (!) of use with hundreds of tabs open.
The current session is about three days old, and currently uses 200MB, with 28 tabs open in four windows. Adding two image-heavy Fark photoshop threads and an 800-post hurricane thread added only 30MB to the total. Adding this extremely image-heavy 700-post Caturday thread temporarily bumped it to 400MB while rendering, but it stabilized at 300MB, and gave the RAM back when the thread was closed. Hardware is a core i7 with 6GB RAM, barely even hiccuped while rendering it. Only cheat I have is an ad-blocking proxy, and most of the time Javascript is disabled. PROTIP: If the site loads with Javascript disabled, enabling Javascript does not run the scripts on the site without a subsequent reload. That's not a bug, it's a feature: you can have dozens of tabs open to your favorite sites, and they will burn no CPU even when Javascript is temporarily enabled when you want to use something like Google Maps. Great for laptops!)
Is that so? Why does my computer start to crawl and become unresponsive when I've left Firefox on for a few days? Freeing that memory by closing Firefox makes it become responsive again. The only reason I ever look at graphs is to find out why my computer is no longer usable.
Firefox on my MBP (4 gig of ram) doesn't use half of the memory and my Ubuntu work machine has 2 gigs of ram and there is no difference in performance when I have a ton of tabs open which will include flash apps (NPR radio) and javascript intensive sites (slashdot/ reddit). If you genuinely have problems with Firefox on 4 gigs of ram then the problem probably isn't Firefox.
Yeah, i guess other browsers are just magical...
This test exercises a situation that's very rare on the web (where by "rare" I mean that it's only been encountered in this test to my knowledge): thousands of absolutely positioned elements that are all being moved around using CSS transforms, with each one only being moved once by going from no transform to a translate transform. That's just not something anyone other than this test does. Most people who want to move an absolutely positioned element just change its .top and .left, but this test sort of went out of its way to do things the weird way.
The net result is that this test ends up hitting a rare-case O(N^2) codepath in Gecko. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=641340 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=641341 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=670311 for the bugs tracking this on Mozilla's end.
Fixing these has not been a terribly high priority, since it would mostly affect this one synthetic benchmark (I say "mostly", because bug 670311 could have benefits elsewhere too).
> This is one of the better 'browser battle' articles, though. Chrome 13, Firefox 6, IE9, Opera 11.50, and Safari 5.1 are put through 40-some tests on both Windows 7 and Mac OS X Lion ..
Where are the browser benchmarks under Linux?
I don't think you understand how memory management works.
I wouldn't care, but Firefox becomes unusable once it hits 2GB or so.
You mean like Slashdot?
The page you're reading has scripts loaded from doubleclick.net, addthis.com and googleanalytics.com.
No sig today...
it's an advert for views from toms hw, so the article is laid over 17 pages
No shit. And then it pissed me off even more when I discovered that you have to register to get the printer version.
If I stop occasionally looking at the graphs and restarting the browser every so often, I tend to notice when Firefox randomly ties up the entire system in a swapping hell. It is a little late to close browser when the mouse becomes non-responsive and logging into a text terminal times out because of the excess swapping. Stuff like that means I tend to know how much memory it is using without looking at a graph, when the system is brought down by just clicking on a link, opening a blank tab, or even scrolling down on a page in a browser with flash and most javascript disabled.
False. Unused RAM is used for caching hard drive accesses. Even if you use an SSD, you get a performance boost from that, but if you've got a regular platter drive? The performance you lose when RAM is being gobbled up instead of used for HD caching just because of your browser is extremely annoying.
You're also using it for free so the least you could is give them ad revenue and disable 3rd party cookies for tracking purposes and as an added benefit they recognise you're being a decent visitor and allow you to temporarily disable ads. Not that I've even used that because I'm not so against paying for things that the mere thought of an ad on the page ruins the whole experience for me.
Every one of these features is completely unique to Safari for Mac. ... Like Lion itself, Safari 5.1 supports several multitouch gestures ... Swiping upward with two fingers causes the page to scroll down. Likewise, swiping downward with two fingers scrolls the page up. ... Using the same two-finger swipe as the scroll gesture, performed left and right, controls navigation. Swiping two fingers to the right navigates to the previous page in your history, and swiping left moves forward.
That's complete bull. My HP laptop supports multitouch gestures just fine, with the exception of the Mac's gestures all being exactly backward. Swiping with two fingers scrolls (in any of the 4 directions, not just vertically). Swiping with three fingers navigates forward/back.
Chrome just has terrible page rendering performance. Firefox scrolls so much smoother.
The best comparison is google image search. Chrome can not even scroll google's own image search smoothly. Firefox does it as smooth as butter. Chrome also scrolls bing's image search poorly as well. Firefox wins in rendering performance.
Even the fish bowl test shows firefox is far better at rendering.
As usual, benchmarks are quite broken.
I can understand when you get a few FPS on a graphic card but.. lets take startup time..
0.8s vs 1.1s and the bar is like so much bigger, while in reality this makes almost no difference.
Then again, testing stuff such as acid3 (which will never be implemented in some browsers to reach 100% because of things the acid3 did not foresee) or memory release wrongly (per process model is forced to release all the memory, threaded models keep a lot in the cache)
there's many other such cases, which basically mean, you can put any of the contenders in the top place (except safari on windows i guess!)
Notice in the benchmarks the absurdly long load times for Tom's Hardware compared to other sites (however not much different from Huff-Po) There's so many ads and crap coming from 3rd party servers that depending on which ad you get, it can severly impact the load time.
There is no reason a user-level application should be able to cause a system driver to crash. Sounds like you have a shitty driver. Why are you blaming it on Firefox?
FYI: IE9 is actually the only major browser on the market that has a selective JavaScript blocker built-in, as part of its somewhat misleadingly named Tracking Protection feature. With the help of the latter you can block scripts (or CSS files, embeds, whatever) either manually, by specifying an URL, or you can download and use many of the "blocking lists", which actually work much the same way AdBlock Plus' do. And you don't even need to download a plugin (like with Firefox or Chrome) for that to work.
I use a process of elimination starting with the most important.
I want to know if the browser is usable on any machine I use. Firefox, Chrome, Opera.
I want to know if the browser is capable of displaying content I access without extensions. Firefox, Opera.
I want to know if the browser is capable of protecting me from certain content. Firefox, Opera
I want to know if I can enhance the browsers abilities. Firefox
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I haven't read up on it lately, but I thought the chrome adblock would not prevent the ad from being requested/downloaded. It would only hide it.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Upgrading to 8 GB would require buying bigger RAM modules than this computer's motherboard recognizes. So it would mean buying a new motherboard, which in the case of a laptop would usually mean a whole new computer. Furthermore, 64-bit Windows and low-volume peripherals do not mix due to the annual cost of KMCS certificates.
Buy more ram
How does one buy more RAM when both slots on the motherboard are filled with the largest stick that they'll take?
Part of the point of blocking ads is loading performance and privacy.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I once had a doctor just like you. I've had a sleep issue for twenty-five years, during which I've become more adept than your average goat at noticing certain details of my physiological state. This particular doctor implied that I was so naive about the scientific process as to verge on creationism and that I matched any wacky hypothesis to reality with no regard to observation. He told me I had no data.
Actually, what I have is an R workspace with an 80,000 line CSV file extracted from Firefox showing my browsing activity over about a year period during which the white band of "away from my desk" appearing roughly once every 24 hours migrates diagonally on the circadian plot with a one hour daily drift. I've managed to treat this subsequently with carefully timed melatonin administration and have reduced the period to roughly 24.15 hours. Miss just one sunrise control pill and I'm an hour pregnant the next morning. And since I've never had a reverse gear on this hasty blue marble, that adds up to a week of night shifts sooner or later.
The other aspect of 80,000 Firefox page requests over a one year period is that I have actually noticed Firefox being one of the worst GD memory pigs of in all of god's creation without consulting system monitor, so STFU about the system monitor. Maybe I installed too many useful extensions, but then if I didn't want the extensions, I would use Chrome instead.
With 200 tabs open in eight FF clients spread over nine desktops, after about ten days, I can often type half a dozen words during frequent FF gcgag stalls (garbage collect gag) before my text blurps out. Whenever FF virtual memory climbs to over a gigabyte, I pretty much have to close my eyes while typing, as the feedback loop in the HTML input box causes me more distress than assistance. I participated heavily in a FF beta a couple of years ago where memory usage was three times worse than it is now. I was restarting FF every few days just to clear the constipation. This on a Linux system with 4GB of memory since upgraded to 8GB.
Thanks for giving my asshole GP a nice pat on the back in his self-satisfied assessment of the observational powers of his hapless sleep-deprived clients.
Not only that, Firefox has decent cookie management as well. Nothing else compares for the whole package.
Obviously IE and Chrome don't want to do that, as it cuts into ad revenue. It doesn't make much difference though, as most users go with browser defaults anyway.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
I'll give a site ad revenue as long as it chooses to show text or still-image advertisements. I've just blocked the MIME type of a certain Adobe product for sites not on a whitelist. Do you think add-ons like Flashblock are an acceptable compromise between the interest of keeping my web browser experience clean and fast and site owners' interest of drawing ad revenue?
I don't see the ads so I it seems to function just fine regardless of what method it uses.
If you were on a 5 GB per month Internet plan, you'd probably care more.
Just wait, once those advertizers dump Flash for HTML5. You'll have no way to block those ads. And even slower performance. Than you'll wish for those days when complex visuals and animations were done in a plug-in.
"Be careful what you wish for..." ;-)
So if one's motherboard cannot handle more RAM, are they supposed to just buy a new one? Is the fact that you have 16 GB RAM an excuse for shotty app development? "Oh, we have plenty of RAM, who cares about system resources?" I have 8 GB of RAM on my rig, but I don't want Firefox taking up 2-3 GB of it just because it can. And there's no reason it should, except for lazy developers. Your "buy more RAM" attitude is snobbish at best, and justifies lazy developers at worst.
with the exception of the Mac's gestures all being exactly backward. Swiping with two fingers scrolls (in any of the 4 directions, not just vertically). Swiping with three fingers navigates forward/back.
In Lion swiping with two fingers does both. It scrolls to the end of the view and then it navigates to the next/previous page.
Actually quite nice.
Let's admit it folks. We're in a bit of denial. Sure,
Chrome came out on top. Still not sure why it's not my default browser. And why I cling to Firefox. I think it's cause more sites are still tested with Firefox.
Safari, showed it's true colors (I've always found Safari on Windows to be slow and fail to load pages. These benchmarks just seemed to confirm my feelings.) I've not been a fan of Safari. Even on Mac it was my secondary browser.
Firefox has been growing slower, and slower. And these tests just seem to confirm what we already know.
Opera, hmm...the little browser that's still there. Why has Opera never taken off. Not really sure.
But let's talk about the dirty little secret. IE9. How many tests was IE9 at the top? A lot...in fact, it and Chrome were doing most of the battling in performance. IE pretty much lost in one area. And granted to many that's an important area. But the truth is, IE is really making some big gains.
My point being, is if further improvements to IE10, particularly in standards compliance, are made. Will we be honest without ourselves and give it it's due?
I've had to start admitting that IE9 is loading many pages faster than Firefox for me. It's a hard pill to swallow.
Ugh, no thanks. It's bad enough that scrolling in text boxes does that sort of thing: scrolls to the bottom of the text area and then starts scrolling the page.
Yeah, I really do love how Firefox is so slow, when I alt-tab to it, it looks lik enothing happens for 2 minutes or so, then pops up.
Or it can pop up instantly, but the moment I do anything like scroll or switch tabs, it stalls and even Windows gives me the "Not responding" signal.
Free RAM is useless yes, but mis-using system resources and relying on swapfiles just makes the experience painful. An SSD helps, but until it's standard in every PC so it can mask poor application behavior, it's not desirable to waste RAM.
Use as much as you need, but don't gobble more and waste it. A small working set and enough memory to do common tasks without having to swap in 500+MB of data makes firefox far speedier than it is now. It's what makes Firefox painful to use when it gets swapped out and what people complain about when they say "don't use so much RAM".
Especially when Firefox swaps in its entire address space, you use it for a few seconds then use another app that swaps stuff in (but is otherwise responsive), forcing Firefox to swap out again and take another couple of minutes to "wake up".
Swearing at my GP was actually helpful this time around, so I now have one positive swearing result out of N as N goes to infinity concerning this medical interaction.
I've got the data set under my thumb to show the man the back of my hand, but it's technically tricky to precisely fit negative attestation data: my FF stream tells me when I'm awake and clicking but not when my cheek is lolling on the Z key.
I just realized I can score each moment in time by linear distance to nearest click (painting my life with a snore to shore metric) and then use the R package FDA (Functional Data Analysis) to fit the data on a Fourier basis using the harmonic acceleration penalty to smooth the curve.
Harmonic acceleration makes my furrow my brow. It's defined as:
L = omega^2 D + D^3
where D is differentiation. Don't completely grasp why this works and haven't tried it out yet.
Ramsay, Hooker, and Graves mostly use it to fit precipitation data. On my personal weather channel, there would be the daily peregrinations of the sand man: the sun will be rising hours before summoned and hang in the sky much longer than usual due to an extraordinary ideation wave, followed by not very much for a day or two. Same old same old. Why do I even tune in?
If you just jump to page 3 of the 17-page extravaganza, they talk about Safari's "Reader" feature, that strips out all of the ads and combines all of the click-through pages into one document. It works great on TH's own article.
Yes it matters, because we're no longer in the days where websites are static HTML and images. You might wish it were so, but tough cookies.
Sure it is, if you have the right browser extensions. Hell, I browse from work with images turned off completely. The web is so responsive.
Oh, and 640k of memory isn't enough for anybody these days.
Ever looked at the demo scene from the early 90s, and seen what those guys could do with just 64k, let alone 640k?
The reason that 640k isn't enough for anybody is that once they found out they had more than 640k, they said "well hell, might as well use it". We've gotten to absurd points where tray icons and such are eating up 30, 40, or 50mb of memory, just because "hey, it's probably there". These coders are using a dump truck to move a deck of cards just because they have access to a dump truck.
although having access to a dump truck IS pretty cool.
I have two computers. A Windows 7 laptop with 4GB of memory and a Debian desktop with 3GB (maxed out). Both computers get unusably slow after a few days. Only then do I check the resource usage and find that Firefox has managed to grow to consume 70-80% of the physical memory. Worse, since it since it constantly touches all it's memory pages, it is the other applications that get pushed out to swap, not Firefox. I restart Firefox, and it's memory usage drops to a 1/3 of what it was using, with the same windows open.
Now I don't know exactly what is causing the memory growth. It could very well be memory leaks in the JavaScript that webpages are serving, and not in Firefox's code. However, they are the ones pushing for rich web applications, so they need to take responsibility for managing these rich applications, just like an OS does now.
Yeah, I liked that little bit of irony too. Although I'm sure it still didn't strip out any of the fully unnecessary screenshots. I don't need to see his desktop, much less on Windows and OS X.
and combines all of the click-through pages into one document
Does it really? I was under the impression it just stripped out the ads.
Page load time is incredibly important. Google, for example, has spent millions upon millions of dollars putting servers closer to users so they can knock milliseconds off the page load times. The difference is usually imperceptible to the conscious mind but does have a tendency to bring users back. Also, IMHO we're just now seeing the building blocks for full fledged 3d gaming and other "enterprise" applications running in the browser (Docs hardly counts).
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
Wow, sounds like we've got a firefox fanboy here. I've actually never met one before. Who are you to comment on how a program is affecting someone else's computer? You have no idea of the setup (aside from the 4 GB of ram), and no idea even what operating system is installed. But you first say ram is meant to be used, as if the browser is the only program running on the system, and then simply deny the fact. I personally have seen firefox use much more than 2 GB of ram during normal usage (though normal for me tends to be more like 20 tabs). It's a horrible memory hog, and simply asserting "no it isn't go bury your head in the sand" is not going to make that change.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
No, the computer first sends all that "unused" ram to the paging file, THEN releases it. That takes quite a bit of time.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
Yes, it combines everything into one long document as well if it can. I used to to scroll through TFA.
Yeah, TPLs are good - the first thing I do now on any machine I'm messing with for family is add fanboy's ie9 tpl.
http://www.fanboy.co.nz/ie.html
If you think the number of computers in category 3 is astonishingly low, then you are wrong. Think about what the average computer out there is? There's a decent chance it's running XP with something like 512MB of RAM. Even if it's running Vista or Windows 7, the average computer isn't going to be very good. Next consider that half of the machines out there are only as good or worse than this machine.
From the Adblock Chrome website:
New in version 2.0: Ads are blocked from downloading, instead of just being removed after the fact!
It doesn't matter. Any crash of this kind is still a bug in the driver, no matter which application has the bad luck of triggering it with its usage patterns.
You can, of course, turn that off. You can also customise all the gestures to your liking, so if you feel it is "exactly backward" you can swap it over.
For the average user who has more RAM and CPU cycles than what they know what do with; does it matter that a page will load in 1sec or 2sec? Seriously, 99% of the consumers won't care.
I'm not sure what RAM and CPU have to do with it.MOST people would rather have their pages load in 1 second over two seconds.
Ok. All I'm saying is that multitouch gestures are not at all unique to Mac or Safari.
"Chrome just has terrible page rendering performance. Firefox scrolls so much smoother."
Want an even bigger surprise? Use IE 9 and then scroll and see how smooth it is? IE 9 has Chrome and Firefox beat with GPU accelerating browsing and these benchmarks only focused on load time and not the actual experience of rendering.
On my 3 year old laptop IE 9 is not that much better, but my desktop has an ATI 5750 GPU and I noticed the difference. /.ers typically ignore anything IE these days and pretend it doesnt exist.
http://saveie6.com/
This is slashdot. They will acknowledge it even exists except at work as a silly PHB browser that they need to support.
I have been flamed and modded down before when mentioning poor rendering performance of Chrome vs IE 9 on a decent GPU. The fact of the matter is IE 9 won Flash and HTML 5 rendering speeds. Sure Chrome loads faster but, try to go to www.msnb.com or Google Images and hit the up and down arrow keys with all 3 browsers?
If you own a Nvida 8600/ATI 2500HD or higher you will see IE 9 smooth with only a little flickering. Firefox is ok but very slow. Chrome is choppy and flickers like mad. On slashdot I can not even read the comments scrolling up and down with Chrome.
On my old laptop they perform about the same but that is because it has an ATI x1200 2007 era.
IE 9 also won ram usage with lots of tabs opened too. Chrome is better but still can take gigs of ram if you open 40 tabs and leave it on for a day or two. IE 9 has selective Javascript blockers too and xss eliminating noScript for most uses ... something most slashdotters whine about and ignore this.
IE brings back bad memories and I do not blame people for shuddering it. It was a decent browser 10 years ago when IE 6 was new as I remember many slashdotters saying they couldn't stand Mozilla/Netscape and that IE was good. It went to hell for 9 years as MS secretly hated it and wanted to return to kill the web and go back to client/server Win32 aps. But MS is coming back out and embracing it now as they realize they have no choice. It will take years to get rid of IE's tarnished image even if it is a decent browser today and is certainly modern again. It is not IE 6 or IE 7 anymore.
http://saveie6.com/
I think the whole thing needs to be thrown out with no Linux tests.
I don't know what the hell you, all my sibling posters, and my sibling's children posters are doing with Firefox. Trying to run Folding@Home from within some sort of browser shell/VM? I have Firefox running 24/7/365 with a minimum of two tabs open, and upwards of 10-12 at any given time, many with flash or video content and high memory overhead. I've yet to see the thing break 600MB of usage in the last two years. Before that, sure, it was attrocious and would nom up over 2 gigs of RAM. Maybe you all need to stop bitching about the fast dev cycle and upgrade.
Cool post bro, highfive \o
Amazon found that a 100ms delay decreased sales by 1%, Google also found similar results where an artificial increase in page loading time decrease the number of searches users performed. So it appears that users DO care, at least at an unconscious level.
In other news, a new study shows that eating slower on your lunch break leads to you eating less food. Story at 11.
As for the Amazon bit, the longer a person has to mull over their decision to actually buy what they added to their cart, the more likely they are to not order. Like the car salesman that tells you he has another buyer interested to get you to buy faster. The longer you think it over the less likely it is he closes the deal.
So no, the users don't care. If a person has actually made their mind up on buying something, 100ms isn't going to affect that. If anything they would favor the slower load as it might help them curb impulsive spending. You hear far more people saying 'I'm spending too much money!' than you do saying 'I can't spend my money fast enough!' Google users aren't going to give a toss if they 'run out of time' and complete fewer searches. 99% of the time the least important searches are going to be performed last, and the user isn't going sweat over not completing those searches. Anyone on a tight enough of a schedule to have all of their searches be of equal importance that must be completed or bad things happen probably isn't going to be using google in the first place. The only people helped by browsers being faster than they are now are the people trying to sell you something. It doesn't help the user at all.
Cool post bro, highfive \o
That's the problem: it doesn't. It eats the RAM, and keeps it eaten. If I don't "watch the graphs", then I don't know when I need to start closing tabs because it's eating too much, and my computer starts to swap and then I do notice, because at that point, everything gets painfully slow. This isn't just a problem with Firefox, however.
Opera's memory management is much much better than their tests show. Opera allows you to set the amount of memory you want it to use and by default is set to automatic which simply takes up as much as you have free. The benchmark Tom's Hardware used simply looks at how much memory is being used and claims more memory used is bad which is a very bad benchmark. Opera uses available memory and reloads pages much faster than other browsers which should really put it in first but according to their test puts it in last.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
Yeah, Opera only runs Adblock and Notscript (not a typo). That's too bad, as it's totally not noscript....hey wait a minute..
Nuff said?
FTFY.
(If you're running an email app, a feed aggregation app, and a social network app in your browser, then your browser is going to use some memory.)
The shareholder is always right.
Um...so if you open 50-60 pages, .... that's um....well over a minute...
That's dead slow for something like "opening 5 pages", considering, I can open 400+ mailboxes and search through them in under 4 seconds -- as
for display -- who could read that fast? But about 200K of 'moderate pages (has to skip through headers even for short messages...
So 1-2/secs/page really sucks.
and you wondered what I was gonna do w/my parallel cpu's...
I think you have on or two tabs too many.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
IE9 is very impressive in that area. In some areas it is lacking. I found firefox ran some html 5 stuff better.
IE really needs to improve its ui. I'm not a fan of its ui as it is now. It needs better extensions too
Yes. Yes, it matters. I have a dual core 1.2Ghz laptop and some HTML5 (and actually Flash too) games still run like shit. They're just simple game, I know they have to perform better.
Oh, and page loading isn't too great either. Especially when I have many tabs opened.
I am not devoid of humor.
Addressing their memory? :P
I am not devoid of humor.
Only one of them runs adblock and noscript...
Maybe two years ago. ;)
I am not devoid of humor.