IBM has this flash ad that shows up across a bunch of tech sites (digg, techcrunch, ars technica, etc.) that just brings my system to a crawl. It doesn't matter what browser I'm using, Chrome, IE9, Firefox, when I hit a site with that ad, CPU just gets destroyed. What an awful experience. I wonder if IBM realizes that this makes me hate them. I always thought advertising was supposed to have the opposite effect from that.
Here it is in case you're curious: horrible IBM ad
just firing up the Chrome browser without launching a single page will leak my Google account!
Yeah. So please fix that, Google. I don't use Chrome regularly, but I do open it at least once a day, and yes, sometimes when connected to an insecure wireless network. Just opening the browser should not leak my account.
I mentioned in a previous post that I'd get some Sunspider scores in the full browsers (Are We Fast Yet is testing just the JS shells with no browser wrapped around them). Testing full browsers allows me to add Opera to the list.
The tests were performed on a brand new Windows XP install. For each browser I restarted between each run. I ran the test 5 times for each browser, discarding the two scores with the highest error bars and then tossing the high and low score to come up with the run that made it into the chart below. For all browsers I tested the most recent shipping version and the most recent pre-release version (Chrome offers nearly daily updates on the Canary channel, Opera offers "weekly" updates, Webkit seems to make a new Windows build every few days, and Firefox has both mozilla-central (m-c) nightly and the JS branch (tm) nightlies.) For Firefox I included the last shipping version, the last beta, the current m-c nightly and the current tm nightly.
I did test IE 8 but the scores were so slow that it completely obscured any distinctions between the top several browsers so I removed it from the chart. The score for IE 8 was 3357.4 ms. IE 9 won't be available for Windows XP so it is not included in this chart. (I will follow-up with a Win 7 test, but given that most Web users are still on XP, I figured I'd start there.)
Here's the chart:
So there you have it. The top browsers, Chrome, Opera, and Firefox are all within about a hundredth of a second of each other, but the latest Mozilla tm build is in the lead.
update A few people around the office and in email asked and so i'm sharing my thoughts with all of you. Yes, all of the modern browsers are reaching the limits of this particular set of tests.
Sunspider was designed before any of the browsers had these truly modern JS engines with just in time compilers and because of that and all the progress each browser vendor has made over the last several years Sunspider is no longer particularly useful as a JS benchmark. This is kind of obvious when you see that all of the top scores are pretty much tied. One one hundredth of a second (across 26 tests) separates the slow from the fast and that's just not particularly meaningful.
This has been known by all the browser vendors for some time, but it was more difficult for me to say it when Firefox was behind on the test -- it was just too easy to call that sour grapes. But now that we're leading, I think it's a good time to say that yes, the difference between the browsers at the top of Sunspider is so small, and the headroom for improvement so shallow for all of us, that this test is no longer interesting.
It's time we all turn our attention to V-8 and Kraken which still challenge all of the browsers in ways that will provide meaningful benefits out on the actual Web. If we're all really going to enable the next generation of powerful Web applications, all of the browser vendors need to start to focus on the kinds of tasks where JavaScript is not yet a viable replacement for native (compiled) code.
Kraken starts to shed light on some of these areas and V8 isn't done yet highlighting others. But the truth is that after the next round of browser releases, Firefox 4, IE 9, Safari 6, Chrome 8/9, and Opera 11, Sunspider just doesn't help anyone any more and we really should treat it the way we do the original CSS box acid test -- don't regress, but don't bother checking up on it with every new release. We've all won and it's time to move on.
“Silverlight is our development platform for Windows Phone... our strategy has shifted... HTML is the only true cross platform solution for everything...."
Bob Muglia, Microsoft President Server and Tools Business.
via Mary Jo Foley
I'm a huge fan of IE 9. I predicted many months ago that it was going to be a killer release for Web standards and that's definitely happening. But WTF, Microsoft? Are you trying to add more confusion to the conversation?
Platform Preview 6 introduces two new major HTML5 features along with bug fixes and performance enhancements made since the release of Platform Preview 5 and the Internet Explorer 9 Beta. The HTML5 features include CSS3 2D Transforms, which provide a simple, declarative way to translate, rotate, and scale elements in two-dimensional space.(emphasis mine)
HTML5 features include CSS3? That's seriously confused. Please stop this. HTML5 is HTML. CSS3 is CSS. They two are not the same thing.
First he kills off Flash on the device-oriented iOS platform. Then he states his intention to kill off Flash on the Mac laptop and desktop OS X platform. Now he's hinting that Apple is going to wipe out Java on OS X.
So what's Steve Jobs up to.
My guess is that he's sure he's got winners on his hands with iOS and OS X and is trying to winnow the field. Fewer platforms to compete with makes Apple's life easier. If they manage to deal serious blows to Flash and (client-side) Java, then it's really just Apple vs Windows, Android, and the Open Web.
I wouldn't be surprised if they think Windows is on a long slow slide downhill and so it's just a waiting game there. They probably think they can beat the Web with internet-connected iOS and OSX native apps. Oh, there's Andrioid out there too. iOS and the App Store are solid competition there and guess what else. Lots and lots of Android apps are developed with Java-based tools on Macs. Make that harder or impossible and that might put a dent in Android too.
The Open Web is my horse in this race and while I'm sure that Jobs sees the openness of the Web as a threat, I'm also glad to see him pushing back against Flash and client-side Java which I consider to be generally bad for the Web going forward. (There's no doubt that they helped to bring rich media and other goodness to the Internet, but with the re-emergence of the Open Web browser platform over the last few years, I think their time has passed.)
So, is the enemy of my enemy my friend? No. Absolutely not. Apple makes some damn fine products -- I'm a huge fan of iPhone, Macintosh hardware, OS X, etc (though I don't use any of them myself) but Job's view of computing is far less Web-like than what we have in Flash and Java, themselves not nearly Webby enough for me. The draconian control that Apple wants over the entire eco-system couldn't be further from my hopes for the future of computing.
That makes this drama very interesting to me because there's no one I want to root for. I guess I'll just keep it in my peripheral vision while I stay focused on bringing about a better and more open Web through Mozilla and Firefox.
I spent a good part of the day trying to install Windows XP on my new Dell Studio XPS 8100 desktop with no success. It came with Win7 64 bit but I want something a lot more mainstream than that for my testing.
The problem is Windows XP install disks don't come with the Intel SATA controller driver so the Windows XP installer can't get off the ground. I tried slipstreaming the drivers into and XP SP3 install disk with nLite, but that didn't work either. The installer doesn't automatically find the SATA driver nor does it if I prompt it with the F6 for 3rd party drivers. There it tries to find them on a floppy which doesn't even exist on this machine.
So, if any of you have any suggestions that might help me here, please do let me know. I'd love to get XP on this machine so I can start publishing some all new and exciting browser performance benchmarks.
Last week we moved ahead of Apple's Nitro engine and today we move ahead of Google's V8 engine. That gives Mozilla's Spidermonkey JavaScript engine (including the Tracemonkey and JägerMonkey JITs) the fastest Sunspider scores on the planet!
(And yes, we are comparing against the latest code for Nitro and V8.)
update: As Nicholas notes in the comments, we didn't really pass Nitro last week since that was only with the JägerMonkey JIT and not the combined JägerMonkey and TraceMonkey JITs (the purple line) which didn't beat Nitro until today.
update2: Here's Google's V8 benchmark.
We're now well ahead of Nitro, but still some distance to go to catch up with V8.
Why is the Google's Demo Slam trophy a golden Opera logo?
Just to help out those who don't see what I see ;-)
A quick color swap:
and the official Opera Software logo:
Mozilla Labs has just announced a proposal for a truly open Web apps ecosystem with no browser or store lock-in and no centralized points of control or restriction. It makes it easy for users to discover, install, and use rich Web applications. It allows developers to distribute apps themselves or through app stores and to sell or give them away. It works in all modern browsers and is based completely on Open Web standards like HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS.
If you want this better future, join us in refining and delivering a truly open Web apps ecosystem.
John made the announcement this morning and for those that didn't see it, or some reporting on the matter, here's your link. Introducing Gary Kovacs, Mozilla's New CEO
It's still really early, but my first impressions of Gary are that he's going to be a very valuable asset to the Mozilla community.
Firefox's JavaScript engine, Spidermonkey (including the Tracemonkey and Jaegermonkey JITs) is now faster than Webkit's JSCore on both Sunspider and V8. Great work, team!
update: also, on the Sunspider benchmark, we're only about 1/100th of a second behind Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine (about 3.5%). Oh, and there's Kraken, where we're still solidly in the lead.
Scrollbars in IE9 are odd, both the main window's scrollbars and any scrollbars that appear in web content. They don't feel quite right and don't respond to mouse-overs like native Windows 7 scrollbars. Anyone know what's the deal with that? Why wouldn't they use native scrollbars?
I'm mostly a fan except for the broken scrolling behavior.
Web developers, it is not OK to mask a big chunk of horizontal scrollable space with a toolbar header thing like that. This breaks page up and page down scrolling (from the keyboard or clicking in the scrollbar trough.)
With your implementation, when a reader reaches the bottom of the page and then pages down to continue reading, he will lose a couple of lines of yet to be read content under that big toolbar header thing.
If you must have a toolbar across the top, move the scrollable areas of the page below it. It's not that difficult to not break such a basic navigation tool as page scrolling.
Today's Firefox beta for Android release is really good. It's still beta, but man I'm lovin' it. If you have an Android device, you should absolutely download Firefox and give it a try. If you have a recent Firefox 4 build, you have built-in sync for both and so it's a breeze to share your Awesomebar and your passwords (and even tabs) between your desktop/laptop and your Android phone. More information at the Mozilla Blog.
