WebKit Gives Konqueror a Speed Boost (Past Firefox) 199
An anonymous reader writes "We always knew that WebKit is going to make Konqueror fast; but how much faster? Today we test that by putting Konqueror with KHTML through the SunSpider JavaScript Test and the then do the same with WebKit. To get an idea of how fast they are compared to other browsers, we also decided to put Firefox 4.0 Beta 2 through the tests."
Re:How important are JavaScript times? (Score:5, Insightful)
That is the wrong question. How important is Javascript speed for advanced web applications and HTML5 games?
Re:How important are JavaScript times? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What the frak is Konqueror? (Score:2, Insightful)
it is the predecessor of webkit. webkit was forked from konquerors html rendering engine.
Re:Not a useful comparison (yet) (Score:4, Insightful)
JaegerMonkey is making steady progress in improving performance and in a couple of months or so will likely be on par with Nitro and V8.
You mean, in several months Mozilla will be approaching the level that Google is at now. It's become pretty clear that Google is able to develop Chrome much faster than Mozilla is able to develop Firefox.
Also, Opera is faster than Mozilla as well, I'd like to see it included on that chart to compare with the others. Maybe even IE9, if it doesn't skew the Y-scale too much.
Re:google chrome (Score:3, Insightful)
v8 only runs on ARM and x86.
That's because the market has chosen to give a care only about these instruction sets. Can you name a computing product sold this month that 1. runs a web browser, 2. isn't marketed primarily as a video game console, and 3. uses something other than ARM or x86 as its primary CPU?
Re: How important are JavaScript times? zero? (Score:3, Insightful)
How important are JavaScript times to the overall speed of rendering pages?
Try (ab)using Konqueror/KHTML as your primary/only browser for a month and you will soon get frustrated by simple things like the What You See Is What You Get on your blog software not working.
I personally do not give a damn about JavaScript performance. It matters zero to me. JS runs "fast enough" in all browsers.
It does matter a whole lot to me that the JavaScript on sites runs as expected.
I do not care if a piece of JavaScript does not work slow or fast.
CSS table layout (Score:3, Insightful)
Even pdftex, which produces nicer output than most browsers and runs incredibly slowly can do about ten pages a second of text-and-image layout and a web browser only needs to finish laying out one screen full quickly - anything off the screen just needs to be finished before the user scrolls that far down the page.
Not always. The layout of an element further down the page can have effects higher up the page. Think of a multiple-screen-tall element using CSS display: table with inner elements using display: table-row and display: table-cell. This can be either a <div> element using a grid layout or an actual <table>; the effect is the same.
Re:Not a useful comparison (yet) (Score:3, Insightful)
The impressive part is that Chrome has managed already to beat Firefox in several areas
In a few areas, yes, and only because they could benefit from the many years of experience gathered in the development of web browsers. When Firefox first hit the scene, a JITing JS engine wasn't even a consideration, as top-notch JS performance simply wasn't that important. The same goes with things like tab and plugin isolation, etc.
I mean, don't get me wrong, Chrome is a very nice piece of work, and Google has the advantage of having a number of paid engineers working on it full time, with a focused vision. My comment was only meant to inject a little perspective into the discussion.
Re:So the real question is (Score:3, Insightful)
The speed changes in webkit are being backported to KHTML.
Is that the actual plan? At one time, I thought the plan was an "unforking" [arstechnica.com].
As to why, its always good to have choices and an alternate source in case someone pulls a Larry Ellison [pcworld.com] on you.
Oracle is wielding patents. If Apple decided to do that, then it wont make any difference if these are two projects or one.
Re:How important are JavaScript times? (Score:5, Insightful)
Javascript performance is largely irrelevant when rendering Wikipedia or Google.
MediaWiki sites such as Wikipedia don't use a lot of JavaScript, but Google does. Google Search's live suggestion was one of the first applications of the paradigm now called AJAX, and Gmail is an outright web app.
Java applets have uses (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, that joke will eventually hit +5 funny but, let me tell what happened today.
Was in market for a end user VPN account, you know they really depend on your IP to their IP speed/path. The largest and known/old VPN provider for such use has made all speed tests in Java. As I was testing something on OS X 10.4.11 Tiger (read as: OLD) and Apple stopped updating Tiger long time ago, along with security updates, I don't dare to enable "applets".
So until the gcc451 test was finished, I was prisoned on that partition.
This is exactly why people want the possibility of having flash/java applet and even shockwave on their browser. Not because they love 3rd party stuff, because a page out there may feature them and that page could matter to you.
I love watching people attack Larry Ellison/Oracle and Java in same context instead of questioning the "cool" guys like Apple and Google.
NASCAR (Score:3, Insightful)