Testing a Pre-Release, Parallel Firefox 278
Firefox, in its official version, still lacks support for multi-threading (running on different processors), though Chrome and Internet Explorer 8 both have this feature. A Firefox project called Electrolysis is underway to close this gap. A blog author tested a pre-release version of Firefox that loads different tabs in parallel, and he chronicles his findings, including a huge speedup in Javascript vs. Firefox version 3.5 (though the pre-release still lags Chrome in many of the tests).
Good thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Other browsers have already caught up to Firefox in speed, features, and standards support.
Many mainstream browsers are speedy, or at least speedy enough, but Firefox does offer a unique mix of features:
Ogg Theora/Vorbis: Currently supported by Firefox, Chrome, Opera
FOSS: Firefox, Chrome (just Chromium?)
Cross-Platform on Win, Mac, GNU/Linux: Firefox, Chrome (maybe just beta?), Opera
For me, both Firefox and Chrom{e|ium} look like good contenders. I've had good experiences with Mozilla products for quite some time, so I'll probably continue with Firefox.
Re:Good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, Firefox and Chrome may be the only two competitors with some features, but compared to others, Firefox just can't compete. Things like supporting multi-threading, tab isolation, plugin isolation, JavaScript execution speed, and general UI responsiveness are all things that Firefox really lacks. Right now, the ability to customize and the fact that its available in Ubuntu without needing extra repos, are about the only things that are keeping me from using Chrome full time.
Re:Good thing (Score:4, Interesting)
If it had a more stable Linux version
What? The beta is pretty rock solid for me. There's one annoying, persistent bug in HTML5, which I haven't bothered to get annoyed about since I don't really see enough HTML5 video to care.
But until fairly recently, Flash was crashing a lot for me. That meant I ran Konqueror a lot, because crashing an entire window full of tabs is still better than crashing all windows full of tabs.
I ran the Chrome nightly builds until there was a stable beta. There were occasional and annoying bugs, but I would often go for weeks without problems. Worst case, a tab crashes, you hit refresh -- but days and weeks pass between those. Honestly, the released version of Firefox was less stable overall, at the time.
had all the addons/themes
I'm not sure how good it's going to be, or how likely it is to work at all, but I did hear people proposing ways for Chrome to run Firefox extensions. However, it does have plenty of its own.
along with the ability to customize absolutely everything
I'll definitely give you that. There are things I've seen Firefox extensions do that Chrome extensions can't touch, yet. But that's actually a nice tradeoff -- Chrome extensions are somewhat limited, but it means that if you try to install, say, the YouTube downloader, it'll only touch your data on Youtube.com, it'll say so, and Chrome will enforce it.
Still, I think it's possible to have our cake and eat it, too.
the fact that its available in Ubuntu without needing extra repos
Why is this a blocker?
I guess, from a privacy/security standpoint, I could see an argument, but from sheer usability, you can actually point and click on a deb to both download Chrome and automagically enable the extra repos.
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It took me a week to find how to install it... I kept looking for an entry in a repo ;-)
RE: Flash crashing... (Score:2)
I run 64-bit Linux and ALWAYS experienced crashes with the 32-bit player and the wrapper workaround. After manually installing the 64-bit Flash player, it's stable. I really have no complaints now.
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https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/cfhdojbkjhnklbpkdaibdccddilifddb [google.com]
AdThwart. AdBlock for Chrome, essentially. Works fine for me.
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They sort of work for me. They don't block ads but hide them after the fact. This causes noticeably slower browsing on some sites where the ad servers are slow or ad content bloated.
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That's consistent with what I'm seeing, actually. Do you know of any Chrome extensions that prevent ads from being loaded in the first place?
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I've found chrome to be a decent brower, and the tab-process thing is very cool, but it doesn't quite live up to the hype I think. It isn't significantly faster than FF on my system (mostly FF falls down in specific, but fairly rare, situations), the UI isn't notably better, and in many ways it's a lot less polished than FF. E.g., if you enable emacs-style editor commands in GTK (which applies to text-entry boxes), they "kinda" work in chrome, but it also steals some keystrokes it shouldn't, which can be
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Chrome may be Faster but it lacks so many basic features that I consider it a non-starter.
* no cookie handling. You can accept all cookies, all cookies from the primary domain, or no cookies at all -- and nothing more. Chrome lacks even such a basic feature as session cookies! Firefox's default handling at least allows you to ask whether you want cookies from a given domain or not.
Privoxy is no good, since it doesn't allow you to whitelist domains without logging on to your proxy server, editing the conf
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Oh please no.
Once upon a time, I used a web browser named Mozilla. It was a nice, speedy alternative to Netscape and IE. Then somebody decided that Mozilla needed tons of addons, themes and the ability to customize absolutely everything. Launch time went from nice and quick to slow and incredibly painful, and rendering all that crap bogged down the system.
But that was ok, 'cause
Re:Good thing (Score:5, Informative)
There is nothing that mandates that you must have tons of addons installed. Yes, they are available and some are useful, but they are not required.
Firefox startup time being slow (and yes, the more addons you have, the slower it will be) falls into the following areas:
* disk I/O (which is not dependent on CPU speed);
* element reflow analysis being called a large number of times (this is a fancy way of saying where everything is positioned on the page - which, yes, does include the UI);
* element reflow analysis takes a long time each time it is performed;
* javascript performance.
The Firefox team are working on, investigating and making improvements to these areas.
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Funny thing is - Seamonkey is for some time noticeably more responsive, speedy and generally able to withstand much heavier browsing than Firefox.
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Right! I mean, apart from cross platform stability and the add-ons and the themes and the ability to customize everything and the adblock, what have the Firefoxes ever done for us, eh? Splitters!
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Chrome's Adblock together with a decent hosts file work well enough for me. And it's a lot faster than FF 3.5, especially on a slow CPU like Atom.
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i find chrome's developer tools adequate. I don't do any layout though
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ogg - no one (general public) really cares. FOSS - no one really cares. Cross platform - no one (general public, again) really cares.
The general public care about stability, outright speed and UI response.
I gave up on Firefox long ago (basically as soon as chrome came out, and then, safari 4 - as a user who used it way back when it was called Phoenix) because it has no killer feature I actually need/want.
Chrome has multiple threads. It makes a massive difference when browsing jav
Re:Good thing (Score:5, Interesting)
This is admittedly not an issue for a ton of people, but Chrome/Chromium is less architecture-portable as well, since instead of being all C/C++ or some other portable language like most browsers, its JavaScript engine [google.com] directly emits native code.
It can currently do x86 and ARM, which covers almost everyone, but does mean that it can't run it on, for example, PPC macs, so I can't use it on my PowerBook, which is actually the machine that I'd most appreciate a faster browser on.
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Since Firefox 3.1, it's javascript engine does the same (it compiles the code on the fly to native code). "We have, right now, x86, x86-64, and ARM support in TraceMonkey." [1]
I don't know about how chrome handles this, but firefox will still interpret the javascript code for the parts of the code that it hasn't generated native code for.
[1] http://ajaxian.com/archives/javascript-jit-the-dream-gets-closer-in-firefox [ajaxian.com]
Re:Good thing (Score:4, Insightful)
That's true, but Firefox will at least still run on platforms it doesn't have a native JS compiler for, presumably by falling back to the interpreter. Chrome just doesn't exist for non-x86/arm platforms.
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Does any other browser provide NoScript functionality?
Great question. I (finally) mostly moved from IE to Firefox for three main reasons: Firebug, AdBlock, and NoScript. The web development and manipulation of Firebug is nice (but has been replicated largely in IE8), and there are ad blockers in IE and Chrome now as well. However, I got tired of any random website running arbitrary code on my computer and NoScript handles this pretty nicely.
I have other small addons for Firefox that are handy, but NoScri
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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In Opera? Not a chance in hell.
Wrong [opera.com]
Nearly all firefox extensions can be done in User JavaScript, and most of them have. User JavaScript itself is the original greesemonkey.
FAIL HATER IS FAIL
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You have to edit the config file to make changes to whitelisting options, because Opera doesn't provide the same UI functionality as Firefox.
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I recently bought a ~600USD device because most of the software it runs is FOSS.
FOSS is an enormously important feature outside the "PC" world, and pretty important in the PC world. Look up why RMS started GNU and the FSF. What are you going to do when your software supplier stops making new releases for the hardware you've got? Thrown it away?
(Details - I had a Nokia E90, a lovely machine, but, since Symbian S60 is closed source I have no way of replacing the increasingly outdated
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Other browsers have already caught up to Firefox in speed, features, and standards support.
They're lacking the 'Eat your Memory' feature.
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I don't know about that.
Every once in a while I'll give other browsers a shot, just to see how everyone's doing.
About the time that Firefox 3.5 came out, I gave the latest Opera a try (think it was 10). Its UI is decent, and it is fast. But it didn't perform as well as Firefox on a system with 512Mb, not by a long shot.
I seem to be able to consistently crash IE8 on a Windows 7 virtual machine I've got. It's also painfully slow at loading pages, opening new tabs, responding to keyboard input, and the like -
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Midori is now pretty stable.
Konqueror is now pretty good, except that it seems to have become unstable.
Arora is fast and well designed, but has a bug that makes t refuses to accept perfectly valid SSL certs, and does not let you force it to accept them either.
None of them (including Opera) can handle large numbers of tabs open at once anything like as well as Firefox plus tree style tabs.
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Which Arora bug is that? I work on Arora and I haven't seen it reported.
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Thread != Process (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox, in its official version, still lacks support for multi-threading
Firefox certainly supports multi-threading. A thread [wikipedia.org] is not the same thing as a process [wikipedia.org].
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There is no reason FF couldn't use separate threads to handle the threading of separate tabs. As it is, if any tab locks up, then the whole set of tabs gets stuck. Whether you use a process to separate each tab or you simulate it with threads, the difference is merely architectural.
The shared memory and object resources is the bottleneck with threads, but there is no reason why a single process couldn't render separate tabs completely separately.
Re:Thread != Process (Score:5, Interesting)
Read bug 40848 for the list of technical issues. Amongst other things, document windows may display and communicate with each other, or refer to each other, which leads to race conditions, etc.
(The process documented in 40848 also explains why this idea has taken 9.5 years and some skunkworks outside/despite the open development process to get this feature to this point.)
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A good few years ago now I was working on an e-commerce website. The checkout/registration process included an address look-up feature; you entered your post code and hit a button, it popped up a window with a list of matching addresses. Click on an address, and the details were written into the form in the parent window, and the pop-up window was closed.
The private administration site did the same thing with product look-ups, etc.
Sure, you could do the same thing with iframes, divs, etc, and opening new wi
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You could arguably achieve the same feat using message passing, no? Or some type of event dispatch and listening singleton. A few locks for sanity and you could have all your windows communicating like they do currently.
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You click a link on page A to page B :link to :visited
Page C in another tab changes style of link to page B from
As for a new window with X or Y URL, cross-frame scripting, a pretty neat if dangerous concept.
My own case: you pick options in one window, and text of printable document in another window changes live, to match your selections.
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Because it's hard to write renderers that catch all edge cases and harder still to sandbox a single thread of execution within a process. Just as the OS, to a degree, "owns" the process and can thus manipulate its environment, the process is the "owner" of its threads and is largely responsible for making sure they don't do anything improper.
Since on every OS platform a lot of work has gone into security in the past ten years, why reinvent the wheel? (Although, apparently, Google has already done this with
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When you spawn a separate process, you are acquiring a memory space that is separate and distinct. This makes it so that the process will only lock / kill itself.
Ah, you must be new to this whole programming thing. Even separate processes can block on semaphores and shared memory.
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If you never see more than 100% CPU in top, it probably doesn't, and I've never seen that, and it doesn't run multiple processes either. /proc/$$/exe.)
Chrome, however, runs several processes, even for plugins (often called "exe" because Chrome spawns
Re:Thread != Process (Score:5, Insightful)
The writer's mistake is more basic than just conflating threads and processes. You left out the parenthesis:
still lacks support for multi-threading (running on different processors)
Which not only conflates cores and processors, but also suggests that multithreading isn't useful if you don't have multiple cores/processors.
When I was writing the concurrency chapter [sun.com] in the Java Tutorial, the experts would give me a very hard time if I allowed even a vague suggestion that this was true. The fact is, threads are extremely useful even if you only have one core to work with. For example, any well-written GUI program will not handle user interaction in the same thread with other functions; if it did, the GUI would freeze every time the program were waiting on something.
Multithreading is a big topic these days because everybody wants to maximize their utilization of all these n-core processors. But it's not a new topic.
This mistake seems to be very common [google.com]. Which leaves me confused as to what's new here. It's not parallel downloading of files — Mozilla/Firefox has always done that. A more robust parallelism mechanism? Or maybe they're copying Chrome and giving each tab its own process (not thread!).
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I might have this wrong, but I believe event-driven programs are, by their nature, multithreaded. This might not be obvious if you write a program by plugging event handlers into an event framework, such as MFC. But multithreading is still going on in the framework.
Re:Thread != Process (Score:4, Informative)
You're wrong. Let's look at the MFC example in more detail. I'll talk about what Windows does quite a bit, but the gist of how it works I think is common to virtually all GUI systems (including Java Swing and X, though don't count me as an authority).
Here's a sequence of steps to follow to illustrate:
MFC is a relatively thin wrapper around the Windows API. The way that you program using the raw Windows API is as follows. The startup procedure (WinMain I believe) creates a new window and displays it to the user. As part of the creation of this window you pass a function pointer that is the address of the callback function that should respond to "messages" that Windows sends your program.
I don't recall the exact signature of the callback function, but it takes four parameters. The first is a pointer to the window that receives the message (so you can use the same procedure for multiple windows). The second is an enum that's the type of the message -- e.g. a button press, mouse click, resize, etc. -- and the third and fourth are message-specific information (e.g. what button was pressed or what the new size is).
Finally, what WinMain does is start the message loop. This is essentially an infinite loop which retrieves then dispatches the next message. (This is often hidden in a "run" function on similar by frameworks such as MFC or Qt.)
So let's consider the path of an event that occurs. Say the user presses 'e'. Windows determines which window is supposed to be notified of the key press, in this case whatever has focus. (There are parenting relationships too, but I won't get into that.) It translates that event into a message it will pass the program -- WM_KEYDOWN. (There's also a WM_KEYUP message.) Windows adds the WM_KEYDOWN message to the application's message queue.
At some point the message loop in WinMain will run (hopefully -- if not, I believe this is exactly what Windows means when it says a program isn't responding). It will retrieve the WM_KEYDOWN message then dispatch it. Retrieving it consists of removing it from the message queue, and dispatching it consists of calling the callback function. (Both of these are hidden from view behind API calls GetMessage and DispatchMessage.)
Windows figures out what callback function needs to be called, then calls it with that window handle, the WM_KEYDOWN message, and information about what key was pressed. The callback function does its thing, then returns. Returning transfers control back to Windows (inside DispatchMessage) which then transfers control back to the application in the message loop, and the program then retrieves and dispatches the next message, if available. (If not, it blocks until one is available.)
The point to notice in this process is that at no point is another thread created. When Windows originally notices an event, it simply places a message into the application's message queue. When the application retrieves and dispatches a message, that is done with simple control transfers within that thread.
While it's true that this sort of programming doesn't quite look like what you get from MFC, .Net, Java Swing, Qt, etc., you'll find a lot of people out there who will say that it's still event-driven programming. And more to the point, if you a
TLDR version (Score:2)
Sorry, didn't realize I wrote so much. Here's the tl;dr version:
I'm pretty sure that all or almost all major GUI programming frameworks proceed by handling one event at a time. An event isn't handled until the previous one is done being handled. This is all done in a single thread.
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Not really. Event driven programming is more about decoupling caller and callee than responsiveness. So, instead of calling the handler directly by function call it either get
routed through a message loop, or is fired over a delegate. Just try to handle a complex function in such a handler, and look how responsive the GUI remains. It will become dead.
Yes, you can work around it, by loading of the code to OnIdle or Timer event, but that is essentially a poor-man's multi-threading, as now you have to break do
Tabbed processes would be better (Score:5, Insightful)
Multithreading still relies on a single point of failure - the shared memory space.
By doing what Chrome did, and breaking each tab instance into its own process, any single tab can crash/hang without affecting any other page.
I know when I load an MPG video that it sometimes hangs the browser, and I can't do anything (close/minimize/switch away) while the media player is being loaded. This sometimes causes me stress.
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Stop surfing porn at work then.
Re:Tabbed processes would be better (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, Electrolysis aims to have tabs in a separate process from the browser UI as a first cut, then work on separate tabs in separate processes. That's not enabled by default, though, so the guy who wrote this blog post wasn't testing it...
Summary is wrong! (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox does support multithreading, what it doesn't support is multiprocessing. Firefox runs as a single process, whereas Chrome has a separate process for every site, plugin and extension.
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Currently if I start firefox twice the second request goes to the first process. With a simple tweak you could allow the second process to start and get a multiprocessing firefox with perhaps a one line change.
I know thats not the point, but are we trying to go the long way around to our solution here? Sometimes it is best not to build an operating system into your application.
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It doesn't relate at all. Javascript is single threaded. If the same thread that runs the js is supposed to process user input, it would never notice the attempt to kill the tab.
The real issue is that threads can't be safely terminated, but processes can be. This is why people want each tab to be a process.
FireFox is great, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong, I love FireFox and it's my preferred browser but I do feel like it's falling behind in a lack of ability to take advantage of certain hardware and software advances.
First as noted, FireFox does not really take advantage of multiple Cpu core's and there's no official 64 bit version. I've read that the developers opinion is that why have a 64 bit version if the most necessary plugin, flash is not available in a 64 bit version so why bother. But Sun does make a 64 bit JRE and that's half the battle and I honestly believe that if a 64 bit official version of FireFox were released that would spur Adobe to jump on the band wagon and produce a 64 bit Flash plugin.
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Android uses chrome, the iPod uses Safari. Both browsers support small screens by letting the user drag the finger/pointer to pan. I am not aware of firefox doing this. It may be a trivial UI tweak but firefox won't work on a phone until it works.
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Fennec [mozilla.org] is Firefox's version of a mobile browser, with finger/pointer panning.
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Why would that spur Adobe to make a 64-bit version? As much as people hate it around here, it would take a 64-bit version of IE being the default to really spur them. I look at our website statistics and over 80% of our hits are from some type of MSIE. This causes much gnashing of teeth, but...
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Why would that spur Adobe to make a 64-bit version? As much as people hate it around here, it would take a 64-bit version of IE being the default to really spur them. I look at our website statistics and over 80% of our hits are from some type of MSIE. This causes much gnashing of teeth, but...
You've got the right idea here. I wonder if Gnash went 64bit before Flash, would that help its adoption?
You are all behind the times (Score:2)
Not really sure but you can ask them why after you download it from http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/64bit.html [adobe.com]
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and there's no official 64 bit version. I've read that the developers opinion is that why have a 64 bit version if the most necessary plugin, flash is not available in a 64 bit version so why bother. But Sun does make a 64 bit JRE and that's half the battle
Flash is used on just about every site out there. Java isn't. About the -only- issue I've had with Java not being installed was that I had to use the simple uploader to upload pictures on Facebook. I haven't had a Java plugin installed in 2-3 years and haven't experienced any loss due to it. However, the lack of Flash would make most sites unusable that the average person goes to A) YouTube B) Flash game sites C) Flash cartoon sites like Homestar Runner D) A -lot- of sites have Flash for navigation.
I honestly believe that if a 64 bit official version of FireFox were released that would spur Adobe to jump on the band wagon and produce a 64 bit Flash plugin.
Who
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You don't need to be a pro you just need to own a camera(s) and have a couple kids. Heck there's a jillion contributors to YouTube who would benefit from 64-bit and more ram. Most of them probably don't even know it.
The right question to me is "Why are we still using 32-bit?"
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As I sit here happily running 32-bit firefox in Windows 7 64-bit, I'm having trouble understanding what photo editing has to do with the need for a 64-bit web browser.
If you have 12 gigs of ram? (Score:2)
How can you make use of 12+ gigs of ram with a 32bit OS? I had to use a 64bit OS just to take full advantage of my hardware.
I wish my CPU were 128bit and I could expand my ram by the hundreds of gigs.
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As I sit here happily running 32-bit firefox in Windows 7 64-bit, I'm having trouble understanding what photo editing has to do with the need for a 64-bit web browser.
Because people who need a 64-bit system for things like photo editing also want to run web browsers. That really didn't occur to you?
It occurred to them, as you might have noticed by them specifying that they use a 64-bit OS that allows them to run the 64-bit photo editors, and a 32-bit browser works just fine. You failed to point out how changing from a 32-bit browser to a 64-bit browser makes a difference to photo editing when the OS is already 64-bit.
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It's sufficient *unless* one needs to access tons of RAM (e.g., for video/photo editing, huge database, ...), and it's faster than 64-bit. So, for +95% of computer uses, 32-bit is fine.
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Maybe, at least for office use.
But almost everybody I know with a "home computer" complains about the time it takes to play with the videos and photos coming out of their ears.
It's only going to get exponentially more significant.
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Yup, I managed to convince my manager that with the rollout of windows 7 to all our new PCs (we sell PCs) that 64bit should be the norm.
So we can now boast "computers with 4GB of ram" and point out to the customer that our machines (and none of our competitors nearby) can use all of it AND the nice big 1GB vid card they just plonked into it :)
Of course there's a few problems, one person just asked me why his program he has been using since windows 3.1 doesn't work...
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Well, why doesn't it? Do you mean Win7 64bit can't run 32bit programs? Why the fuck not?
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Win 3.1 couldn't. 16-bit. Maybe MS thought that by 2009 people had had enough time to port their old 16-bit programs?
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Which is a perfectly valid question from a user, and should have been considered when upgrading..
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First as noted, FireFox does not really take advantage of multiple Cpu core's and there's no official 64 bit version.
Ahh nostalgia ... who would have thought back then that in 2010 a web browser would ever have the need to take advantage of multiple cores!
Re:FireFox is great, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Uuum, sorry? I use 64 bit Flash on Linux right now. Yes, from Adobe.
They still call it alpha, but apart from it sometimes hanging the browser for a minute at start, but then working... and a bit of memory leaking... it is no different from the r32 bin Windows release version.
Also, video playback is much faster with it.
Also, no 64 plug-in is a lousy excuse. As we use Flash on 64 bit systems trough multilib/“emulation” since forever. :)
Oh, and since my Firefox is self-compiled, I’m pretty sure it also is 64 bit.
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They still call it alpha, but apart from it sometimes hanging the browser for a minute at start, but then working... and a bit of memory leaking... it is no different from the r32 bin Windows release version.
So, you mean it works exactly like the Windows release version? ;-)
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I have similar problems (Firefox, Ubuntu), except that it doesn't crash the browser: just the plugin. It seems to have fewer problems in Konqueror, so I tend to use that for Youtube.
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Of course it takes advantage of multiple cpu cores. Just look how many threads it's running.
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There is an early 64-bit version of Adobe's flash plugin: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/64bit.html [adobe.com] (Linux only)
The first sentence is wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
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That may be the reason for speedup in Java scripts test?
Sorry, in this case it really is “JavaScript (scripts) test“. :)
Java is something completely different than JavaScript. As much as C++ and Python are different, but the first one was partially inspired the second one. Java was originally called Oak. And JavaScript can be called ECMAScript. Maybe that makes it easier to keep them apart.
When has threads ever simplified anything? (Score:2)
You can potentially split a program into user level threads just to simplify code.
Ermm... maybe I just don't have sufficient experience writing real-world code, but when do threads ever simplify anything?
I mean, you have to worry about race conditions and deadlocks all of the sudden, which means you have to pretty much lock everything, and in some consistent order.
Plus, if you have some nice abstraction (say, a shared hash map) which does all its own locking the right way, making every operation (insert, delete, retrieve, etc.) a transaction, you need to break the abstraction and poke at
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They are easier in other programming languages (Java, Python)
ummm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Process-per-tab shouldn't speed up Javascript unless you're doing something else in a second tab that's hogging CPU. Most likely the Javascript performance gains came simply from the fact that he was using a 3.7 branch of the code. Which is kind of sad, considering bleeding-edge Firefox still lags behind Chrome by a considerable margin.
Re:ummm... (Score:5, Informative)
Lags behind Chrome on a particular benchmark (Sunspider). Ignoring for the moment the Sunspider tests that are purposefully slower in SpiderMonkey than in other JS engines (by using extension features that only SpiderMonkey implements and that slow the test down if implemented), that leaves the question of how relevant Sunspider is.
In my testing, Chrome is anywhere from 4x faster to 4x slower than Firefox on various JavaScript/DOM/canvas tasks. It really depends on the task, as expected: if nothing else different jit heuristics will lead to better or worse performance on the same code even if all else is identical.
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But yes, you're right that the multi-process parts of electrolysis (which this guy didn't enable and hence wasn't testing) have nothing to do with JS performance.
Multi-threading != running on different processors (Score:2)
Multi-threading is running multiple threads of execution on a single cpu, which has been done on single-cpu processors for decades. That's not multiprocessing [wikipedia.org].
I thought this was a tech site.
What next - an article about how someone just bought a new hard disk to upgrade their ram, because it was cheaper than chips and a lot bigger?
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No multithreading in FF? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Processors do not matter... (Score:5, Informative)
You do realize that your Prescott Pentium IV is more power hungry than Intel's current faster offerings, right? Perhaps you should buy an AMD if you despise intel and would like to be greener.
Re:Processors do not matter... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Entertainment (Score:3, Insightful)
You have a fairly complicated comment there. Let's dig a little.
This has so many red herrings I will skip it entirely. The second part gets more interesting.
"...productively engage in a constructive discussion with me with respect to the most efficient way to use the resources at our disposal and how to get to the point where that is the focus of our society rather than consume, consume, consume..."
"Being productive" is more than creating text & spreadsheets. "Make the recreation more efficient". *TV* i
Sorry, bud... Processors still matter! (Score:3, Insightful)
The bottom line is that you have to run up against the fact that a decade ago CPU's could satisfy any reasonable need for processing power. Now all one is buying CPUs for is "fluff" -- watching TV on ones computer, playing games, etc. I.e. it produces nothing, it contributes nothing, it is simply a consumer computing mentality -- my computer exists to entertain me.
I have an Athlon XP 3200+. It's a nice chip, and all, a 32bit one. And for many tasks, it is more than adequate. But when watching flash video fu
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Anyone who needs/wants more processing power is dumping the electricity down the non-productive heat drain (e.g. gamers) or pursuits which will never produce anything of use (e.g. SETI@HOME).
What about CAD, or complicated simulations? Are you saying that modern methods of research and engineering don't produce anything of use?!?
The processors have been more than sufficient for a decade or more ... If the old software/hardware works fine then be comfortable with it. Do not easily accept that upgrading is a requirement.
Yeah, and automotive technology has been more than sufficient for 80 years or more; who really needs to got more than 50 mph, or have air conditioning? I'm not really sure what your even complaining about. Are you trying to say spending resources on having fun is unethical, and that there's no point in increasing the standard of living? And
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Yeah, that's why Intel started to sell those cheap processors called 'Atom'. Performance worse than a Prescott, while having less than 1/10 of the power consumption.
The reason behind the problem of 'why can't I have the same level of experience compared to 10 years ago using the same hardware?' isn't just about forcing upgrades. It's tightly related to software developer productivity. such as:
- using interpreted or JIT-compiled languages like .NET CLR, javascript, Adobe Flash, Java, python, etc. instead
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I hate to jump in to this, but I have to point out that I am far more productive today with two monitors and a modern dual- or quad-core processor than I ever could have been on a 200MHz Pentium Pro. IDEs can be sluggish enough as it is, and even small speed increases can make a tangible difference in my productivity; your attitude of "200MHz ought to be enough for everyone" is simply ridiculous. I got a lot done on my old 133 MHz Pentium I on my old laptop in high school, but even then I knew my producti
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Oh yeah, this was me. Not sure how it posted Anon, must've mis-clicked.
(If I was using lynx, this wouldn't have happened!)
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