IE9, FF4 Beta In Real-World Use Face-Off 358
An anonymous reader writes "Most browser benchmarks are isolated, artificial tests that can be gamed by browser vendors optimizing those specific cases. With only those benchmarks to go on, the folks at LucidChart were skeptical that the IE9 beta would actually outperform other modern browsers in real-world applications. To separate hype from reality, they built their first browser benchmarking tool, based in LucidChart itself. This benchmark is to SunSpider what a Left4Dead 2 benchmark is to 3Dmark Vantage. Product specs don't matter, only real-world performance on a real-world application. The results were surprising. IE9 held its own pretty well (with a few caveats), and the latest Firefox 4 beta came in dead last."
Re:Maybe time to move to Chrome? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Maybe time to move to Chrome? (Score:2, Informative)
Ugh, poor benchmarking (Score:2, Informative)
Firefox 4 beta 6 doesn't have the new JavaScript engine in it. Beta 7 will have it. But there's no particular need to wait for beta 7 as they could benchmark a nightly now. They also don't mention what kind of video card they've got in that laptop. IE9 and Firefox 4 can take better advantage of a good video card on Windows 7 than the other browsers tested and that may significantly influence a charting benchmark like this one.
Re:Translated from Redmondese this means... (Score:1, Informative)
jaegermonkey (Score:3, Informative)
I'd be much more interested to see it being done with the builds of FF 4 that have jaegermonkey enabled. Though that should be merged into the main branch fairly soon with any luck.
http://www.conceivablytech.com/2673/products/first-look-firefox-4-jaegermonkey/ [conceivablytech.com]
Re:Maybe time to move to Chrome? (Score:4, Informative)
I use Ubuntu 10.04. I have mostly switched to chrome (not completely; there are still sites that don't work properly with it). My problem with firefox was memory usage. I tend to have *lots* of tabs open and I often don't reboot for weeks. Firefox memory usage creeps up over time and my laptop slows. I keep reading that this is no longer supposed to happen, but it happens to me. Chrome with a comparable number of open tabs does not slow everything else down.
If Firefox were better behaved I would stick with Firefox.
Re:dev IE9 and dev FF vs release Chrome? (Score:1, Informative)
You mean like how they didn't test with Opera 10.70 beta? Or how they didn't even use the latest release version of 10.62?
Re:Translated from Redmondese this means... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Chrome: Very Beta (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Maybe time to move to Chrome? (Score:3, Informative)
SRWare Iron was created for the sole purpose of earning the "creator" some money on ad revenue. To borrow from my previous post on the subject:
Everyone mentioning SRWare Iron should know about this little tidbit: The story of Iron [neugierig.org]. The article and the linked IRC log [neugierig.org] tell a very interesting story about a guy less concerned with having a good reason to fork and more concerned with making money off of adsense and publicity for creating a "privacy-respecting" Chrome which is basically a perpetually outdated Chromium with a few checkboxes in "Under the Hood" defaulting to off.
The guy who runs that blog does not try to hide the fact that he's a Chrome developer, and he admits that there is the highly unlikely possibility that the person who was asking these questions was not the person who went on to release Iron. I was skeptical as well until I checked out the log file itself and quite honestly it would have to be an incredible coincidence for this guy to be asking such questions and providing the information that he does in his attempts to glean information on the right way to advertise his product as well as how to go about renaming the executable. There's more that makes it very reasonable to believe this is the guy who went on to release Iron, so please don't dismiss it until you've checked out the log file in detail. If this was a supremely unnecessary and elaborate hoax it sure is pulled off convincingly.
Using Iron after reading this information made me feel like I was supporting the wrong guy here and I couldn't do it anymore, it was just too uncomfortable seeing that this guy was looking for adsense revenue and to make a name for himself. The attitude of this developer is not one I would encourage at all.
Re:Maybe time to move to Chrome? (Score:4, Informative)
Alternatively just go to the Options page in google's Chrome version, and uncheck "Use a suggestion service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the address bar". Crome stops the 'snooping' then.
Re:dev IE9 and dev FF vs release Chrome? (Score:2, Informative)
Look, apart from the fact that it was a little too heavy on my ram (FAR less than FF btw) Opera was ok, BUT i thought it was unfortunate that they filled it with superfluous crap. Like the massive toolbar on top which is now a tiny toolbar that FF4 is copying quite directly, the animated tab switch thingo (which you could disable mind), and that annoying dialer thing which every browser has now
FTFY
Re:Too late for a film at 11 joke... (Score:3, Informative)
Your comment doesn't really apply. Microsoft is the only company with enough balls to ignore certain aspects of Acid 3 that aren't official specifications of HTML/CSS/JS.
Mozilla also ignores SVG fonts, as they should (enter WOFF), but you are right in that they are not a company. They are both right, and both deserve kudos for standing up to the hysteria of artificial 100 score on Acid3.
update.. (Score:1, Informative)
3) is now obsolete in the latest Firefox 4 nightlies - http://blog.zpao.com/post/1140456188/cascaded-session-restore-a-hidden-bonus [zpao.com]
Re:Too late for a film at 11 joke... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:dev IE9 and dev FF vs release Chrome? (Score:3, Informative)
(note: That is the windows version I am talking about. The linux version's UI is a bit off and it is a little slow to load)
Re:FF4 was not dead last (Score:3, Informative)
Well, the suggestion of trying the nightly builds isn't such a bad idea, because it does include the have the improved engine (Jeagermonkey). The currenty latest beta does not have the improved engine. So the any performance test you do with Firefox 4 Beta is going to be nothing like the release version.
Re:Translated from Redmondese this means... (Score:3, Informative)
Amusing. The post above you requested a filesystem that didn't fragment. You request copy-on-write, which massively increases fragmentation. With ZFS, every single write adds a new fragment. If you write a file, then modify a few bytes in the middle of it, CoW means that the file will now be in 3 fragments. This cripples performance on mechanical disks, which is why ZFS needs a lot of RAM for the ARC and recommends a big blob of flash for the L2ARC.
The separation of policy and mechanism in NTFS is actually quite similar to the design of ZFS, so implementing CoW semantics would be relatively easy to do at the policy layer. Like ZFS, NTFS differentiates between the low-level on-disk storage mechanism and the high-level user-visible layout.
Re:Speaking as someone that switched to OS X (Score:3, Informative)
Test case + bug #, or it didn't happen.
Sure. And apologies for getting the year wrong--it's actually been since 2003.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=222747 [mozilla.org]
I can't tell you how many Mail.app bugs haven't been fixed. I can tell you that I get a lot more complaints from Thunderbird users than from Mail.app users.
Another bug which I don't even know how to submit to Bugzilla and so haven't. User is composing an HTML email. While typing, midsentence, and for no apparent reason, the font changes. I thought the user was doing something dumb like clicking elsewhere in the email, but no, the font / style just randomly changes mid-sentence.
It's these kind of bugs that are SO irritating to users.
Re:Speaking as someone that switched to OS X (Score:3, Informative)
Here's another example (somebody on Slashdot posted this awhile back and I bookmarked it for hilarity)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=92165 [mozilla.org]
Re:dev IE9 and dev FF vs release Chrome? (Score:4, Informative)
Bartab [mozilla.org] + FF 4 beta = almost instant restart with 100+ tabs.
Oh, actually, looks like bartab like functionality is now the default in the latest builds, as per the anonymous coward below. http://blog.zpao.com/post/1140456188/cascaded-session-restore-a-hidden-bonus [zpao.com]