Firefox 4 RC Vs. IE9 RC: the First Duel 176
An anonymous reader writes "Firefox 4 vs. IE9 is going to be an epic battle in a reigniting browser war in which Microsoft wants its IE to be seen as a capable browser again. Mozilla struggled to keep the pace with Chrome and IE9, but is about to release the first release candidate, which is expected to be the final version of Firefox 4 as well. This first review of JavaScript, Flash and HTML5 tests seems to indicate that both browsers are about even at the bottom line, while Firefox has the JavaScript edge and IE is ahead in HTML5 performance."
Re:Anyone else slightly bored of the browser wars? (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree they are only worth posting when there is a significant win one either side. Right now it looks like IE9 has a slight lead in some areas over Firefox. Which means nothing. Other then IE has gotten the Most Improved Award. Just as long as we have competing browsers that have a fair market share (EI, FireFox, Chrome and Safari) I am happy once either side gets a good win (Like IE 5-6 did) then that is where the trouble gets in where the winner separates from the standard and forces its own standards. And the others are trying to play catch up to support as many of the winners standards as well as trying to follow the prescribed ones. Thus creating problems again. Right now I think we are in a new golden age of browsers where it really doesn't matter which one you use anymore and you can choose a browser based on features and performance in particular areas vs. needing to render particular pages.
IE and WebGL (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sunspider and IE9 (Score:5, Interesting)
Sunspider is a redundant test -- as are Kraken, V8, and the rest of them. Synthetic benchmarks are inherently flawed and we should all pay far less attention to them, but they happen to be easy to convey and chart (much like flawed compliance "tests" like Acid3 and html5test).
That said, there was almost certainly no cheating. That was a valid optimization. What was identified was a boundary condition in the JIT, which took two syntactically identical statements, which were not lexically identical, and showed that only one was optimized out. People who don't have any idea how to make an optimizing compiler decided that the only way this could happen was cheating, leaving out mistakes or intentional heuristics.
The problem with that theory is that it would be more difficult to develop a cheating optimizing compiler with the characteristics it had, for that situation, than to actually come up with an optimization, so it's outright absurd. The guy who discovered the discrepancy never called it cheating.
The RC scores the same in those tests now. I bet it was something simple like doing a quick one-line dead code elimination pass before the full dead code elimination heuristics decided whether to bother trying.
Re:I don't use Firefox for performance reasons... (Score:4, Interesting)
However, I've actually moved all my friend from Firefox to Chrome because they refuse to use any plugins
DPI-Awareness still missing. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:DPI-Awareness still missing. (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows has had a very well-defined meaning for DPI, and has done since XP. EVERYTHING is supposed to scale with the DPI setting. Everything does scale in most Microsoft applications. Yes, that includes documents and margins and UI elements.
If you want the UI elements to be larger but not the body, then you've ALWAYS done it by setting larger sizes for UI elements in the DisplayProperties control panel. Not by setting DPI.
There is no "DPI aware problem", apart from the UI programmers you mention -- and they're just being ignorant or lazy.