Interview With Google's V8 Author Lars Bak 111
Dr Pete writes "Financial Times has an interesting piece about Lars Bak and Kasper Lund the authors of the V8 virtual machine in Google's Chrome browser. 'Chrome attracted more than 10 million users in its first 100 days. Although that's an impressive number, it still only translates into about 1 per cent of browser usage online. It will be a while before it can compete with Firefox, Internet Explorer and others. In December last year, Google announced that Chrome was now out of its development, or Beta, phase and is ready to be shipped as a pre-installed browser on some PCs. This could rapidly increase the number of users. Moreover, the European Commission's antitrust battle with Microsoft over, among other things, how its own browser, Internet Explorer, is integrated into its Windows operating system may give competitors such as Google a chance to claim ground.'" Interestingly enough Google Chrome is currently fighting it out with Safari as the #3 web browser on Slashdot.
Interview (Score:2)
How is this an "interview"?
Chrome as the built in? (Score:4, Informative)
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or did he mean that you couldn't install IE at all?
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Can't it be both?
Re:Chrome as the built in? (Score:5, Informative)
awesome! (Score:2)
I didn't know that, but it's perfect for me. I didn't know I had the option of keeping IE 8 and removing Windows 7 completely. Sweet!
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Why would you want to keep IE at all when Firefox, Chrome (as soon as they get around to porting it), Konquerer, all the Gecko browsers besides Firefox, etc. are readily available? Why would you force yourself to undergo the sheer agony of using IE?
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Woosh!
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Wait... you thought I missed the joke?
Woosh!
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"Sheer" is about 100 Libraries of Congress worth of agony. I also have a car metaphor if you think that'll help.
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sheer agony == failure of Acid# tests for a much longer period of time than could possibly be reasonable.
See also: crappy interface (the tabs are huge!), imitator (IIRC Opera invented the tab), general slowness, and vendor lock-in by E.E.E. (not Eee).
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actually tabbed browsing appeared on a different version of IE about 2 years before Opera. It wasn't MS who introduced it of course -- it was an IE "shell" program, but it actually was a version of IE.
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In Windows 7 Beta build 7048 and later:
Control Panel --> Programs and Features
In a sidebar, there is something that says "Turn Windows features on or off". It is an administrative action, and marked as such, though the UAC doesn't nag you about it by default in build 7048.
Just uncheck the "Internet Explorer 8" item, restart twice (really; no, I can't think of a good reason why), and iexplore.exe (at least) is gone.
I dunno what it removes other than iexplore.exe, but it at least removes the application.
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I dunno what it removes other than iexplore.exe, but it at least removes the application.
Unfortunately, it can't remove mshtml.dll, because it's the basis of embedded IE, which has been available on Windows for the past decade.
In other words, a number of programs rely on mshtml.dll, including things like Valve's Steam game distribution system and the various Symantec products.
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In other other words, if you use Windows and expect things which need HTML-rendering to be even slightly secure, you're fucked.
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Well, at least it removes the Internet Explorer application itself. Does turning off IE remove everything that IE needs that the OS doesn't, or is it just iexplore.exe that goes bye-bye?
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Unless you're running 64-bit Windows 7, where it doesn't run at all [google.com]
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Besides I'm pretty sure they fixed that problem in 2.0. Not 100% sure because i'm not on a 64 bit build right now.
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I find it interesting that the key developer is show with a Macintosh but chrome does not run on Macintosh (yet).
What about Iron? (Score:5, Interesting)
According to the Wikipedia page on Google Chrome:
The Wikipedia page further details the information collected by Chrome.
Any comments?
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I've heard so much about Chrome on Slashdot, but nothing about Iron.
According to the Wikipedia page on Google Chrome:
The Wikipedia page further details the information collected by Chrome.
Any comments?
Yes, Iron is great! I love that it has a built in adblocker too!! I am leaving the slowness of Firefox (seriously, why is Firefox so damn slow to render pages!!)
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What does iron do that the chromium builds don't?
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Perhaps having the list here would be more useful then me randomly googling it.
Now if I provided those results I would have something.
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I installed it a week or two ago to give it whirl. It has a VERY minimalistic interface (not necessarily a bad thing), it loads REALLY fast on my old P4, but the browser tended to freeze often on some of the busy pages I visited (could be due to Flash, not sure).
Now mind you I haven't used Chrome, so I'm not sure if my observations would also be valid with Chrome. YMMV.
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Well, I've had issues with Chrome being unresponsive, but I think its XP's swappieness that fucks it up, because it runs single pages beautifully.
Sadly, I had to get back to Firefox. Maybe I'll try Chrome in WINE when I get around to installing a free-as-in-speech *NIX on this old laptop.
Cheers!
Chrome has much lower market share than Safari (Score:2, Interesting)
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I'm betting that Chrome would easily surpass Safari here on Slashdot if Google ever gets around to coming out with the Mac and Linux versions.
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Theres Flash 64bit version and theres even Moonligh 64bit version for Firefox. Don't know about Java.
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Yes, there is a Flash 64 bit for Linux - now. And, there is a 64 bit Sun Java for Linux - now. Neither of them are "final release" yet. And, I waited literally for years for them to come out. Moonlight? I installed that on a previous incarnation of Ubuntu, but never saw that it did much of anything. Maybe I need to visit more silverlight p
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http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/03/chromium-for-os-x-state-of-the-browser.ars [arstechnica.com]
"uncompressed source tarball occupies about 5GB of disk space"
"From start to end, the process took about 8 hours and the compilation is best run overnight."
"Make sure your directory path has no spaces."
The good part seems to be
"When you sync to the current build, you receive not only the latest OS X-specific updates but also those cross-platform ones that g
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On my (low traffic site) Safari handily beats Chrome, but Chrome is rising.
I like Chrome (and eagerly await the MacOSX version), but I am disappointed in a few areas. It has good support for web standards, but is missing a few things from webkit(like @font-face support) which I use on my site. The font and graphics rendering is also low-quality compared to Safari - jaggies everywhere.
The much ballyhooed V8 engine is much better than current production browsers, but there does not seem to be much difference
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You are right - I just ran sunspider (on Windows) with the latest nightly of Firefox: Chrome is 1.66 times as fast. On the other hand, Safari 4 even faster still.
I don't mean to dump on V8, all I am saying is that it has some competition for the crown. It is great that we have the choice between so many capable browsers.
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You are right - I just ran sunspider (on Windows) with the latest nightly of Firefox: Chrome is 1.66 times as fast. On the other hand, Safari 4 even faster still.
I don't mean to dump on V8, all I am saying is that it has some competition for the crown. It is great that we have the choice between so many capable browsers.
Even more important, this may help people to understand what is obvious to us: Microsoft does not care about writing good software. Almost everybody is writing better Javascript engines and browsers (and to some extent operating systems) than Microsoft. In fact, Office is OK, but Microsoft knows where they have to invest money - improving microsoft browsers could make activeX and similar stuff obsolete, loosening their grip. If Office were written as IE is coded, then you would see people dumping it.
Bu
Re:This will be a big help for server side Java al (Score:2, Insightful)
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Have you built CouchDB from source? It requires and uses Mozilla's Javascript implementation. CouchDb server side scripting is done with Javascript.
I see that my original post was judged offtopic - a hint that Slashdoters are not quite up on their tech -- just bullshit.
Server side Javascript will become important - I am willing to take bets, my friends :-)
BTW, CouchDB rocks!
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Oops - I just noticed in my subject that I said "Java", not "Javascript" which is what I meant. Oh Well :-)
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Not at all retarded: speeding up Javascript runtime performance with compilation, JITs, etc. will obviously help server side frameworks like CouchDB that use Javascript (although CouchDB is written mostly in Erlang).
I understand that most people are more concerned with Javascript performance in the browser which is what the article was about, so my original post probably was off topic.
Linux and osx (Score:5, Interesting)
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The other half depends on chromium receiving plugin support, or at the very least adblock and bookmark syncing.
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Just in case you didn't notice, typeface designs are NOT subject to copyright in the united states. So I'm not sure how msttcorefonts could be "non-free", given that they aren't copyrightable at all. If they are writing something else in their EULA, that's because they are lying / exercising wishful thinking.
Re:Linux and osx (Score:4, Informative)
Non-scalable fonts are not subject to copyright in the United States, but may be subject to design patents. Scalable fonts in the other hand, are subject to copyright. The output of these fonts are not, but the font files themselves are.
If you want to think of it one way, scalable fonts are full blown computer programs, and are thereby subject to copyright, even if what they output is not. I can write a program that outputs the first million digits of pi, and the program can be subject to copyright protection, even though the output mist definitely is not. Same basic idea.
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It's the hinting - an embedded program used to transform the glyph images at small sizes, so they don't look crap.
That part definitely is copyrightable.
However, Freetype doesn't use hinting in TrueType / OpenType font files by default, because the technique is patented (by Apple). Instead, it has an auto-hinting system, which works just great when you have anti-aliasing or subpixel rendering turned on. I suppose one could simply create some fonts with the same metrics and general appearance as the Microsoft
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Instead, it has an auto-hinting system, which works just great when you have anti-aliasing or subpixel rendering turned on.
Unfortunately, no, it does not. Subpixel font smoothing has been a long standing issue in Linux (and other systems that use FreeType) for me, as, unfortunately, it's nowhere near as good as Microsoft's ClearType. I recall there had been some patches for FT in more recent releases of Ubuntu that improve things (but might violate patents?), but the occasional letter still has a line so blurred out that it's nearly invisible (normally diagonal lines in "k" and "x" suffer), or another line that's way too thick.
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1. GRANT OF LICENSE. This EULA grants you the following rights:
* Installation and Use. You may install and use an unlimited number of copies of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT.
* Reproduction and Distribution. You may reproduce and distribute an unlimited number of copies of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT; provided that each copy shall be a true and complete copy, including all copyright and trademark notices, and shall be accompanied by a copy of this EULA.
Copies of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT may not be distributed for profit either on a standalone basis or included as part of your own product.
2. DESCRIPTION OF OTHER RIGHTS AND LIMITATIONS.
* Limitations on Reverse Engineering, Decompilation, and Disassembly. You may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the SOFTWARE PRODUCT, except and only to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation.
* Restrictions on Alteration. You may not rename, edit or create any derivative works from the SOFTWARE PRODUCT, other than subsetting when embedding them in documents.
* Software Transfer. You may permanently transfer all of your rights under this EULA, provided the recipient agrees to the terms of this EULA.
* Termination. Without prejudice to any other rights, Microsoft may terminate this EULA if you fail to comply with the terms and conditions of this EULA. In such event, you must destroy all copies of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT and all of its component parts.
3. COPYRIGHT.
* All title and copyrights in and to the SOFTWARE PRODUCT (including but not limited to any images, text, and "applets" incorporated into the SOFTWARE PRODUCT), the accompanying printed materials, and any copies of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT are owned by Microsoft or its suppliers. The SOFTWARE PRODUCT is protected by copyright laws and international treaty provisions. Therefore, you must treat the SOFTWARE PRODUCT like any other copyrighted material.
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Is the osx version available for download yet? The website says it is still in development.
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Linux build from source (Score:1)
I have built the linux version from source (using whatever is under the hood of depot_tools/gclient sync - git I think).
Just to check the speed claims as I found it hard to believe - but they appear to be true. Default is debug build was at about 9 secs on SunSpider (with most of the difference in the strings section) vs release build 1.4sec and this was about a week ago.
Usable kind of but noticeably improving with each build I do.
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the startup time blows away all the other browsers on my system
What kind of startup times are we talking?
I'd never imagined browser startup times to be an issue. IE8 on my two-year-old laptop (running Windows7 x64) goes from "click to launch cold" through to "fully-rendered home page" quicker than I can time it, probably about half a second.
Is this the guy? (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Is this the guy? (Score:4, Informative)
No, but the country is correct. Lars Bak, Kasper Lund and the drummer are all from Denmark.
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slashdot browser / os stats (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe I have imagined this, but I thought there used to be a slashbox which displayed OS and or browser stats.
I think it got to be a bit depressing to see the % of linux users dropping as /. attracted bigger and bigger crowds so that slashbox disappeared.
I doubt there is another website which has more linux users so the /. stats probably represent a best case number for linux market penetration.
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Take this with as bigger grain of salt as you should with any AC post. But I run a couple of medium-size sites, technical in nature, but not exclusively for GNU/Linux users: the percentage of our visitors using GNU/Linux is at approx. 10%. My educated guess is that Slashdot's would be between 10-20%, given that it's aimed a little more at GNU/Linux users than either of the sites I run. Note: the second figure was pulled from my arse, the first figure was based on months of statistics for two Web sites.
Maybe
GoogleUpdate (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd be a lot more inclined to use Chrome if I could do so without it installing the GoogleUpdate service and then turning it back on after I've explicitly disabled it. Windows is bloated enough without me being "tricked" into running additional services that I don't want or need.
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Just use either portable chrome or portable chromium then, replacing the app folder with nearly-hourly builds from http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-xp/LATEST [chromium.org] (delete rlz.dll). But no auto-updates this way.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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No, wrong. Making updates trivially easy to install is the best way to go for most users. Forcing the update on the user is always the wrong way to go.
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What about 64 bit. (Score:1)
I was looking at using v8 in our open source soft-switch/pbx/telephony application server FreeSWITCH http://www.freeswitch.org/ [freeswitch.org]
We currently are using spidermonkey from Mozilla and it has it's ups and downs in the scalability department since it was not designed for thousands of concurrent sessions in a single process. The documentation for v8 was impressive but sadly, 64 bit is not supported. It would be nice to get 64 bit supported so we could experiment further with it because it looks really well writt
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since it's open source, you can add 64-bit yourself. That's the whole point of open source.
The whole point of open source is for projects to work together and combine their efforts to make better software. As I said I am the author of an open source software. It has over 300,000 lines of code of it's own then a large list of dependency libs that added up account for about 2.5 million lines of code see: http://fisheye.freeswitch.org/browse/FreeSWITCH [freeswitch.org] A library developer makes a library for other people to use. Adding 64 bit support to someone else's library is an exercise best left to the lead
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...or perhaps chrome reverts to a non-JIT javascript vm on 64bit arch?
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Everything on my Ubuntu installation is 64 bit. Every single application. Since I'm using Chromium, I guess that I have V8 in 64 bit. Just add the Chromium repository to Apt, then apt-get the source. You don't even have to know how to compile. (I do know how to, sort of, but I'm certainly not proficient - just let your installer do the work!)
I suspect it's using ia32-libs and not actually 64 bit. I have two reasons for suspecting this.
1) Chrome does not support 64 bit builds [chromium.org]
2) The Ubuntu Chrome Daily PPA page [launchpad.net] says "no native 64bit debs planed for now. The amd64 package is using ia32-libs."
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Everything on my Ubuntu installation is 64 bit. Every single application. Since I'm using Chromium, I guess that I have V8 in 64 bit. Just add the Chromium repository to Apt, then apt-get the source. You don't even have to know how to compile. (I do know how to, sort of, but I'm certainly not proficient - just let your installer do the work!)
I suspect it's using ia32-libs and not actually 64 bit. I have two reasons for suspecting this.
1) Chrome does not support 64 bit builds [chromium.org]
2) The Ubuntu Chrome Daily PPA page [launchpad.net] says "no native 64bit debs planed for now. The amd64 package is using ia32-libs."
Yep, like i said, it's a shame, The idea is that we would use it in our project which is a telephony server that runs much better on 64bit, that's really the only show stopper from our being able to try it instead of the spidermonkey library we use now.
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Everything on my Ubuntu installation is 64 bit. Every single application. Since I'm using Chromium, I guess that I have V8 in 64 bit.
Wrong. If you're using Chromium, it's 32-bit. Try the following commands on /bin/rm and /usr/bin/chromium-browser (or whatever):
$ readelf -h /bin/rm | grep Machine /usr/bin/chromium-browser | grep Machine
Machine: Intel 80386
$ readelf -h
Machine: Intel 80386
If you're on a 64-bit install, the first will say "Advanced Micro Devices X86-64"; the second will remain "Intel 80386", indicating that Chromium is in fact 32-bit.
(By the way, Slashdot: long runs of spaces do not constitute "too many junk c
Browser Stats (Score:1)
Interestingly enough Google Chrome is currently fighting it out with Safari as the #3 web browser on Slashdot.
According to who? Everyone has different numbers. I can pull some out my ass that make Firefox #1, or Firefox #4.
Who is the authority on browser percentages?
Aero
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Who is the authority on browser percentages? [...] I can pull some out my ass that make Firefox #1, or Firefox #4.
in this case, the editor who posted the story? unless you can pull Slashdot logs out of your ass, I dont care what you do back there.
Obvious joke (Score:3, Funny)
I could have had a V8! [syr.edu]
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Heh. That looks quite similar to my grandma's computer before I despyware'd it. Browser wasn't that clogged up, but it wasn't that far off.
OTOH, she'd managed to get some program that replaced the start button windows logo with some other company's logo. It's sad when the windows start button becomes just another ad.
Non-tech conclusion: Google should buy Sun! (Score:3, Funny)
.
A virtual machine.
JIT.
sandboxing
frameworks
cross-platform capability
bytecode (at least for Android)
.
Might as well buy Sun, use their IP and re-implement everything in Scala.Then they'll be ready to take over the world.
i would find it highly ironic (Score:3, Insightful)
if an anti-monopoly ruling of some court would help the biggest search engine to bundle their browser preinstalled to consumer PCs.
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i would find it highly ironic if an anti-monopoly ruling of some court would help the biggest search engine to bundle their browser preinstalled to consumer PCs.
Why? Antitrust law only applies to bundling that undermines a free market. Even the largest competitor in a given market can bundle without necessarily undermining a second market, if they lack sufficient influence in the market. Google bundling a browser (where they obviously don't have a monopoly) with PC's (where they also obviously don't have a market since they don't even sell them) has little or nothing to do with antitrust law.
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Can we please stop the antitrust suits already? (Score:1)
It *might* have made sense when browsers weren't free, but now that they are, how is bundling a browser with your OS an antitrust issue? Why don't they go after Apple? Why don't they force Microsoft to stop bundling Notepad?
it's all smoke and mirrors (Score:1)
TFA only affirms: nothing good can ever come out of corporate environment...
everything worthwhile is done on a farm, in a galaxy far far away, e.g. V8, Doom, Luke Skywalker...
On professional side, V8 sucks googles comparing to some other VMs.
V8? (Score:1)
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How does a browser's SMP support affect network stability? I'm curious.
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