How Do Browsers Scale? 141
An anonymous reader writes "Benchmarking browsers is a somewhat silly exercise, since scores cannot be replicated on a variety of hardware, and it is not uncommon for even the same system to fail to replicate benchmarks scores, especially in JavaScript tests in two succeeding runs. The guys over at ConceivablyTech have an interesting approach, running browsers through multiple tests on different sets of hardware (including an Android smartphone), and showing the scaling differences between browsers when you are using a dual-core netbook on the low-end and a six-core desktop on the high-end. They also tested HTML5 on Firefox mobile and found the browser has better HTML5 support than the current Firefox 4 Beta 6."
Conclusion: Firefox 3.6 scales best across cores (Score:4, Informative)
Firefox 3.6 scales best across cores
Re:Need a better client-side scripting language (Score:4, Informative)
Javascript != Java
Oracle has no sway over javascript
Re:Conclusion: Firefox 3.6 scales best across core (Score:3, Informative)
No, Links [jikos.cz].
Re:Need a better client-side scripting language (Score:5, Informative)
Javascript runtimes are way faster then most other scripting languages at the moment.
If you go to the benchmark game [debian.org] you'll see v8 is about 6.5x faster then python and tracemonkey is 3.8x faster.
The only credible "scripting" language runtime that is faster then Javascript is LuaJIT, and Lua has nowhere near the features that JavaScript does.
CTRL + Mouse wheel (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Thrash for several hours before benchmarking (Score:1, Informative)
Perhaps my problem is due to one or more of the plug-ins I use.
No, it isn't. I don't *use* plugins.
Going back several millennium - I've consistently had this problem with FireFox. On Windows (2000, XP, Vista), Linux, and OS X. It's not a specific version. It has nothing to do with platform.
Firefox has speed and memory issues that have been there for eons, that keep getting brushed off with, "Oh, plugins!"
Re:Need a better client-side scripting language (Score:3, Informative)
And Jython does not have a GIL. In much the same way there are multiple implementations of JS (tracemonkey, spidermonkey, v8, ...) there are multiple implementations of Python (CPython, Jython, PyPy, ...)
In the end, multithreading support is not a language limitation in either language, it usually is a implementation limitation.
Re:Need a better client-side scripting language (Score:3, Informative)
Re:http://sparkbrowser.com (Score:3, Informative)
Sparkbrowser, unlike Internet Exploere and Firefox has every feature that is needed on the control panel, Sparkbrowser tracks your clicks, and search preferences to give you a better more personalized browsing eperience.
If you are weary of your privacy and believe that sparkbrowser has invaded your privacy, you probably should have read the terms of use before you downloaded it.
At least they are upfront about it but since there is no "do no evil" pledge, I will have to pass.
Re:Thrash for several hours before benchmarking (Score:4, Informative)
It can also be poorly-coded websites.
The BBC's news page used to have an annoying javascript news ticker that ran across the top of the page. As it ran it built a slowly larger and larger array of something or other and memuse would slowly creep up. When I stopped having that as my home page my ff memory problems stopped.