It's nice to have this in the latest versions of all the popular browsers (Firefox, IE, and Chrome) and it took cooperation from Adobe to make that happen. Good on them too.
Boris is 100% correct. Mozilla shipped this feature in Firefox 4 and if you have the newest Flash version, it "just works."
This story's headline is misleading. It should be "IE, Firefox, and Chrome..." because IE shipped it first, Firefox shipped it second, and Chrome just now got around to shipping it.
This is "usage" as measured by the number of visits to websites across the world using different operating systems. There is no bias here because of what system the machine came with. This is the system as it's running when connecting to the Web.
Vista and 7 both "require" a GPU powerful enough to do that, so MS can get away with not keeping a software renderer in the browser.
Um, no. Microsoft cannot get away without a software render in the browser even on Windows 7. There are far too many GPUs on Win7 systems that they don't support or don't support them. There are also plenty of places that the "renderer" doesn't use the GPU.
I know it's a common thing on/. to take a little bit of knowledge about things and pretend it's a lot of knowledge, but when you get this far away from what you actually understand and start making completely false claims, you hurt more than help. Please be more careful in the future.
But shutdown, it wasn't just one careless blog post. It was infused through out the entire campaign around IE9 and the IE10 developer preview. It was in the stage presentations, the press briefings, the blog posts and more. This wasn't some silly little slip. This is Microsoft's well-reasoned attack on the other browsers.
Maybe the engineering team for IE doesn't deserve this but they are the ones that chose to work for a company known for this kind of dishonesty. There are several other organizations out there employing browser developers and if I was an IE dev, I'd be seriously considering whether or not I wanted to work for a company that shits all over my great work with that kind of ugly marketing.
You can make up your own opinions but you cannot make up facts. You are entirely wrong here. What is it that gives you the confidence to just post lies when there are plenty of people around that know better? Seriously?!
Firefox usesvarious DirectX APIs on Windows7 and Vista and XP and uses OpenGL for Mac and Linux. Where it's incomplete it WILL be completed in upcoming versions.
If this is what they are claiming then they are not being stupid, they're lying. Firefox 4 on Windows 7 uses the exact same Direct3D and DirectWrite APIs that IE 9 uses. And in some cases we use them *more effectively* than even Microsoft does. And in most cases we did it *before* Microsoft.
Maybe you're thinking of Mac and Linux where we are using different solutions. Or maybe you're just ranting without the facts and offering your guesses (in which case you should say so up front.)
Chrome and Safari are only based on *some* of the same underlying technology. They share some rendering code. They don't share a JavaScript engine (one of the hottest areas of browser development of the last three years) and they don't share the same graphics pipeline (where hardware acceleration, another hot topic of the last few years, is a critical differentiator) and they don't share security and networking and various other critical underlying technologies either.
It is a myth that they are the same except for slightly different UI choices. They are fundamentally different beasts.
Plus, IE is still leading in browser market share.
This really isn't the case. IE6 is not IE7 is not IE8 is not IE9. They are each very different browsers. IE9 will never surpass Firefox's latest browser in market share.
IE9 will top out around 20-25% in two years if their historical trends of browser and OS upgrades continue. Firefox 4/5/6/etc (the latest available version) is ahead of IE9 today and will stay ahead for the foreseeable future making Firefox 4 the most widely used browser in a month or two when it passes Chrome.
Firefox uses D3D on Windows Vista and Windows 7. Microsoft has no exclusive access to D3D and in some well documented cases Firefox's architecture makes Firefox's employment of D3D even more effective in pushing graphics operations off of the CPU and onto the GPU than does IE's. Firefox accelerates scrolling, for example, where IE falls on its face.
And all of this can be yours for the low low price of a $200 Windows upgrade if you're one of the hundreds of millions (more than 50% of the Web) users on Windows XP.
The trade-off is between using Aero Snap, something users do only rarely, and not repeatedly during a browser session, and benefiting from Fitts's Law as you switch between tabs, something users do all the time. The current thinking is that it's better to optimize features for the overwhelmingly common case at the expense of the exceedingly rare case.
Nobody in their right mind who cares about privacy is going to run random javascript without having any clue what it does.
Not really true. Even people who run with JS disabled and only enable it for specific sites where they consider it useful or necessary mostly don't inspect that JS to see what it's doing. And, there are plenty of people who think they care about privacy who don't even know that JS is a threat. Many think "well, I cleared my cookies, that's good enough." These people are both in their right mind and care about privacy. They just don't, and shouldn't be expected, to know how to, and for every site they visit, decipher a dozen JavaScript files.
Are you suggesting that these people don't deserve privacy?
They can fingerprint you based on your OS, system fonts, plug-ins, IP address, screen resolution and other exposed hardware capabilities, time zone, etc. Then they can surveil you as you move around the Web and increase the strength of that fingerprint based on the sites you visit that are in their "network" (think about how many properties Google owns from search to gmail to docs to youtube to blogger but then remember also that they can see you at non-googel sites because of adsense and google analytics and youtube embeds and feedburner and sites with re-captcha or google checkout or maps mash-ups or google's site-specific searches.
You are not anonymous, even if you rebuild your VM every day. You'd have to randomize all the features of your OS and your browser and then you'd have to reboot between pretty much every website you visit.
It's worth remembering that everything a corporation tracks and stores is subject to subpoena or outright theft by the US Government. Tracking isn't ephemeral. There are increasingly large "profiles" of you being stored in databases of some very large corporations and if you really believe that those are safe and secure from prying eyes, whether it's employees of those companies, insurance companies that want nothing more than can charge you more or drop your policy, or government agencies who are convinced you're a threat to national security, you're sadly mistaken.
Kudos to Mozilla for the overall improvement, but I'd really like to see results on a benchmark not so heavily biased to such uncommon use cases (compilation speed without hot path optimizations). In particular, I'd like to see benchmarks of common use cases that factor in the performance of their tracing engine, which is the piece of their stack that Mozilla has invested so heavily in. The Kraken benchmark provides some interesting stress tests along those lines, but it's still very narrowly targeted and not representative of current or anticipated use cases.
What use cases do you think belong in Kraken that aren't there now? Have you offered those suggestions (or better yet, actual tests) to the Mozilla Kraken folks? I'm sure they'd appreciate your help. It is, after all, an open source project.
As a developer I completely understand the dislike of the "everything in a browser" attitude, but we need to look beyond that. The next version of ECMAScript will give us the security we've been wanting, and this round of browsers will give us the speed we need...Now give me an 100% on the Acid3 test please, that way I'll have multiple tools to leverage against my boss next time he asks me to make a web app IE6 compatible.
I mostly agree with you except the speed we need part and the Acid3 part. We don't have the speed we need. We're all fast at the kinds of things that traditional Web pages want us to be fast at and we're even fast at the kinds of things that some Web apps need all browsers to be fast at, but we're not fast enough yet for truly rich applications. We can't do amazing photo manipulation, audio generation, artificial intelligence for gaming, etc. This is where the Sunspider and V8 benchmarks are letting us down. They don't stress the kinds of things we all need to be fast at to enable the next generation of apps on the Web. They're really only testing the things we need for the current and previous generation of Web content. Second, Acid3 is not a good Web standards test. It covers a tiny bit of what we all need to be compatible at and it tests a lot of stuff that no one cares about (SVG fonts, for example, which no one thinks has a shot and for which WOFF is a far better solution -- and all the browser vendors agree on this!)
So, we still need to get a lot faster JS performance on things that will enable the next generation of apps on the Web and we need to focus not on arbitrary slivers of compatiblity as measured by things like the Acid 2 and 3 tests but on large swaths like CSS2.1, CSS3, SVG, Canvas, Web Workers, Web Sockets, Storage, HTML5 multimedia APIs and more. We're still a few years away, but all of the browser vendors are making great progress.
I agree. Even IE 9 should be good enough by now, to not much JS that much of a bottleneck when loading web pages, even pretty JS heavy ones.
Also, as for tuning, there's no secret that Mozilla has tuned Firefox 4 particularly to win Sunspider and V8.
Two points. One, JS is not a bottleneck when loading pages but it is still a bottleneck for large Web apps. Check out Microsoft Office Web apps, Zimbra, or Google Docs for some examples. We have a long ways to go before JS is not a bottleneck for rich Web applications.
Two, yes, Mozilla has tuned Firefox for for Sunspider and V8. But guess what? Those tests were written by Apple and Google and tuned for their JS engines. It's a lot easier to write a test that you're fast at than to make yourself fast at a test. We've finally caught up with them on their own tests and now we're going after the kind of speed that their tests don't even touch -- native code speed.
I am sure this will set off a whole series of arguments over benchmarks, tuning, fairness, etc. But from this article I will just take this: I don't care which one is fastest to the few dozen milliseconds, they are probably all in the same "class" now. Everybody wins. (I can sorta understand not including IE, but wonder why they didn't include Opera?)
Now that Javascript is so much faster,....
Sunspider is a particularly bad benchmark. It was developed before any of the browsers had JITs. V8 is a bit better but still doesn't really stress the browser with the kinds of tasks that are still slow in JS. Mozilla's Kraken benchmark, http://krakenbenchmark.com/ does that. If you want to see why we still have a long ways to go, compare the speeds all browsers get on the Kraken tests with compiled code implementations of those features. Firefox leads the way on much of that, but it's still slow compared to native code. Kraken should help us focus on the real goal which isn't one-upping each other on various tests that are already fast in JS, but trying to catch up to compiled code. We all have a ways to go there.
"Firefox's GPU acceleration works only in Windows if I remember correctly."
Not true. Firefox hardware acceleration is cross-platform.
Firefox features, even those that have deep hardware and OS integration, are always planned cross-platform and while one platform may lag some, we do our best to make sure that if the platform is capable, then we implement the feature there.
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It's nice to have this in the latest versions of all the popular browsers (Firefox, IE, and Chrome) and it took cooperation from Adobe to make that happen. Good on them too.
Boris is 100% correct. Mozilla shipped this feature in Firefox 4 and if you have the newest Flash version, it "just works."
This story's headline is misleading. It should be "IE, Firefox, and Chrome..." because IE shipped it first, Firefox shipped it second, and Chrome just now got around to shipping it.
This is "usage" as measured by the number of visits to websites across the world using different operating systems. There is no bias here because of what system the machine came with. This is the system as it's running when connecting to the Web.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-quarterly-200803-201102
Linux is below 1% and falling. Linux on the desktop is almost imperceptible.
Vista and 7 both "require" a GPU powerful enough to do that, so MS can get away with not keeping a software renderer in the browser.
Um, no. Microsoft cannot get away without a software render in the browser even on Windows 7. There are far too many GPUs on Win7 systems that they don't support or don't support them. There are also plenty of places that the "renderer" doesn't use the GPU.
I know it's a common thing on /. to take a little bit of knowledge about things and pretend it's a lot of knowledge, but when you get this far away from what you actually understand and start making completely false claims, you hurt more than help. Please be more careful in the future.
- A
But shutdown, it wasn't just one careless blog post. It was infused through out the entire campaign around IE9 and the IE10 developer preview. It was in the stage presentations, the press briefings, the blog posts and more. This wasn't some silly little slip. This is Microsoft's well-reasoned attack on the other browsers.
Maybe the engineering team for IE doesn't deserve this but they are the ones that chose to work for a company known for this kind of dishonesty. There are several other organizations out there employing browser developers and if I was an IE dev, I'd be seriously considering whether or not I wanted to work for a company that shits all over my great work with that kind of ugly marketing.
Vendor makes up nonsense technical jargon in an attempt to co-opt the Web and other vendors call them on it with humor. No need for follow-up stories.
You've just described all currently shipping browsers.
You can make up your own opinions but you cannot make up facts. You are entirely wrong here. What is it that gives you the confidence to just post lies when there are plenty of people around that know better? Seriously?!
Firefox usesvarious DirectX APIs on Windows7 and Vista and XP and uses OpenGL for Mac and Linux. Where it's incomplete it WILL be completed in upcoming versions.
If this is what they are claiming then they are not being stupid, they're lying. Firefox 4 on Windows 7 uses the exact same Direct3D and DirectWrite APIs that IE 9 uses. And in some cases we use them *more effectively* than even Microsoft does. And in most cases we did it *before* Microsoft.
Maybe you're thinking of Mac and Linux where we are using different solutions. Or maybe you're just ranting without the facts and offering your guesses (in which case you should say so up front.)
- A
Chrome and Safari are only based on *some* of the same underlying technology. They share some rendering code. They don't share a JavaScript engine (one of the hottest areas of browser development of the last three years) and they don't share the same graphics pipeline (where hardware acceleration, another hot topic of the last few years, is a critical differentiator) and they don't share security and networking and various other critical underlying technologies either.
It is a myth that they are the same except for slightly different UI choices. They are fundamentally different beasts.
Plus, IE is still leading in browser market share.
This really isn't the case. IE6 is not IE7 is not IE8 is not IE9. They are each very different browsers. IE9 will never surpass Firefox's latest browser in market share.
IE9 will top out around 20-25% in two years if their historical trends of browser and OS upgrades continue. Firefox 4/5/6/etc (the latest available version) is ahead of IE9 today and will stay ahead for the foreseeable future making Firefox 4 the most widely used browser in a month or two when it passes Chrome.
Firefox uses D3D on Windows Vista and Windows 7. Microsoft has no exclusive access to D3D and in some well documented cases Firefox's architecture makes Firefox's employment of D3D even more effective in pushing graphics operations off of the CPU and onto the GPU than does IE's. Firefox accelerates scrolling, for example, where IE falls on its face.
Once again, I didn't claim "complete HTML 5 support". I claimed "complete native HTML 5 support". There's a joke there, see?
Actually, a sizable chunk will have to upgrade their entire PC to get Windows 7 so it's a lot more for lots of folks.
And all of this can be yours for the low low price of a $200 Windows upgrade if you're one of the hundreds of millions (more than 50% of the Web) users on Windows XP.
The trade-off is between using Aero Snap, something users do only rarely, and not repeatedly during a browser session, and benefiting from Fitts's Law as you switch between tabs, something users do all the time. The current thinking is that it's better to optimize features for the overwhelmingly common case at the expense of the exceedingly rare case.
The plan you're talking about is Mozilla's post Firefox 4 plan.
Nobody in their right mind who cares about privacy is going to run random javascript without having any clue what it does.
Not really true. Even people who run with JS disabled and only enable it for specific sites where they consider it useful or necessary mostly don't inspect that JS to see what it's doing. And, there are plenty of people who think they care about privacy who don't even know that JS is a threat. Many think "well, I cleared my cookies, that's good enough." These people are both in their right mind and care about privacy. They just don't, and shouldn't be expected, to know how to, and for every site they visit, decipher a dozen JavaScript files.
Are you suggesting that these people don't deserve privacy?
They can fingerprint you based on your OS, system fonts, plug-ins, IP address, screen resolution and other exposed hardware capabilities, time zone, etc. Then they can surveil you as you move around the Web and increase the strength of that fingerprint based on the sites you visit that are in their "network" (think about how many properties Google owns from search to gmail to docs to youtube to blogger but then remember also that they can see you at non-googel sites because of adsense and google analytics and youtube embeds and feedburner and sites with re-captcha or google checkout or maps mash-ups or google's site-specific searches.
You are not anonymous, even if you rebuild your VM every day. You'd have to randomize all the features of your OS and your browser and then you'd have to reboot between pretty much every website you visit.
It's worth remembering that everything a corporation tracks and stores is subject to subpoena or outright theft by the US Government. Tracking isn't ephemeral. There are increasingly large "profiles" of you being stored in databases of some very large corporations and if you really believe that those are safe and secure from prying eyes, whether it's employees of those companies, insurance companies that want nothing more than can charge you more or drop your policy, or government agencies who are convinced you're a threat to national security, you're sadly mistaken.
Kudos to Mozilla for the overall improvement, but I'd really like to see results on a benchmark not so heavily biased to such uncommon use cases (compilation speed without hot path optimizations). In particular, I'd like to see benchmarks of common use cases that factor in the performance of their tracing engine, which is the piece of their stack that Mozilla has invested so heavily in. The Kraken benchmark provides some interesting stress tests along those lines, but it's still very narrowly targeted and not representative of current or anticipated use cases.
What use cases do you think belong in Kraken that aren't there now? Have you offered those suggestions (or better yet, actual tests) to the Mozilla Kraken folks? I'm sure they'd appreciate your help. It is, after all, an open source project.
- A
As a developer I completely understand the dislike of the "everything in a browser" attitude, but we need to look beyond that. The next version of ECMAScript will give us the security we've been wanting, and this round of browsers will give us the speed we need...Now give me an 100% on the Acid3 test please, that way I'll have multiple tools to leverage against my boss next time he asks me to make a web app IE6 compatible.
I mostly agree with you except the speed we need part and the Acid3 part. We don't have the speed we need. We're all fast at the kinds of things that traditional Web pages want us to be fast at and we're even fast at the kinds of things that some Web apps need all browsers to be fast at, but we're not fast enough yet for truly rich applications. We can't do amazing photo manipulation, audio generation, artificial intelligence for gaming, etc. This is where the Sunspider and V8 benchmarks are letting us down. They don't stress the kinds of things we all need to be fast at to enable the next generation of apps on the Web. They're really only testing the things we need for the current and previous generation of Web content. Second, Acid3 is not a good Web standards test. It covers a tiny bit of what we all need to be compatible at and it tests a lot of stuff that no one cares about (SVG fonts, for example, which no one thinks has a shot and for which WOFF is a far better solution -- and all the browser vendors agree on this!)
So, we still need to get a lot faster JS performance on things that will enable the next generation of apps on the Web and we need to focus not on arbitrary slivers of compatiblity as measured by things like the Acid 2 and 3 tests but on large swaths like CSS2.1, CSS3, SVG, Canvas, Web Workers, Web Sockets, Storage, HTML5 multimedia APIs and more. We're still a few years away, but all of the browser vendors are making great progress.
- A
I agree. Even IE 9 should be good enough by now, to not much JS that much of a bottleneck when loading web pages, even pretty JS heavy ones.
Also, as for tuning, there's no secret that Mozilla has tuned Firefox 4 particularly to win Sunspider and V8.
Two points. One, JS is not a bottleneck when loading pages but it is still a bottleneck for large Web apps. Check out Microsoft Office Web apps, Zimbra, or Google Docs for some examples. We have a long ways to go before JS is not a bottleneck for rich Web applications.
Two, yes, Mozilla has tuned Firefox for for Sunspider and V8. But guess what? Those tests were written by Apple and Google and tuned for their JS engines. It's a lot easier to write a test that you're fast at than to make yourself fast at a test. We've finally caught up with them on their own tests and now we're going after the kind of speed that their tests don't even touch -- native code speed.
- A
I am sure this will set off a whole series of arguments over benchmarks, tuning, fairness, etc. But from this article I will just take this: I don't care which one is fastest to the few dozen milliseconds, they are probably all in the same "class" now. Everybody wins. (I can sorta understand not including IE, but wonder why they didn't include Opera?)
Now that Javascript is so much faster, ....
Sunspider is a particularly bad benchmark. It was developed before any of the browsers had JITs. V8 is a bit better but still doesn't really stress the browser with the kinds of tasks that are still slow in JS. Mozilla's Kraken benchmark, http://krakenbenchmark.com/ does that. If you want to see why we still have a long ways to go, compare the speeds all browsers get on the Kraken tests with compiled code implementations of those features. Firefox leads the way on much of that, but it's still slow compared to native code. Kraken should help us focus on the real goal which isn't one-upping each other on various tests that are already fast in JS, but trying to catch up to compiled code. We all have a ways to go there.
- A
"Firefox's GPU acceleration works only in Windows if I remember correctly."
Not true. Firefox hardware acceleration is cross-platform.
Firefox features, even those that have deep hardware and OS integration, are always planned cross-platform and while one platform may lag some, we do our best to make sure that if the platform is capable, then we implement the feature there.