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A Blog From Behind the Trenches

Attack of the Bugs

Posts tagged with "performance"

Futuremark loved Opera, but the love was not returned

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DailyTech recently interviewed Futuremark's Oliver Baltuch. As some of you may know, Futuremark are the makers of the well known hardware benchmarking software, 3DMark. A while ago, they released the Peacekeeper Web browser benchmark.

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A better benchmark: Benchmarking Browsers with Real Websites

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We are all used to all the artificial JavaScript benchmarks out there by now. What they have in common is that they all test small parts of JavaScript, and none of them are testing real-life performance.

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JavaScript performance? What about layout performance?

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Performance benchmarks are all the rage these days, but everyone seems to be focusing narrowly on artificial benchmarks that basically tell you how certain browsers perform at the particular JavaScript functions chosen for those particular benchmarks.

It's surprising that there is little or no focus on other, perhaps more relevant performance aspects of modern pages. For example, how do browsers perform when it comes to dynamically changing the style of a page (CSS)?

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Yet Another JavaScript Benhcmark

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It's old news by now, but do we really need yet another one? Peacekeeper "simulates the load placed on the browser by common JavaScript functions as used by popular, modern websites", but weren't all the other ones supposed to be doing that as well?

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Microsoft thinks IE8 is faster than Chrome and Firefox

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Microsoft claims that IE8 is faster than Chrome and Firefox. The question is if those results are because IE8 is actually faster, or if it's just that most sites are designed to work as smoothly as possible in IE. IE is the dominant browser, after all.

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Microsoft dismisses artificial JavaScript benchmarks and the JavaScript performance race

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Today, our core team revealed our entry into the JavaScript speed race with Carakan. We have no intentions to be left in the dust when it comes to performance. But what does Microsoft have to say about this?

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Carakan and Vega

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Look out for Carakan (apparently prononunced "Jarakan"):

we have now taken on the challenge to once again develop the fastest ECMAScript engine on the market

While the current engine (Futhark) focused on minimizing footprint and memory usage, Carakan is designed for pure speed. If you are wondering how it looks compared to other JavaScript engines, let's just say that it looks very, very good indeed, and that is without all possible optimizations applied.

Fans of fancy effects may also want to look out for Vega, Opera's new hardware accelerated vector graphics library.

I doubt that these will make it into Opera 10, but hopefully we'll be able to get something out there for testing later this year.

There are a lot of other major and probably completely unexpected things going on for both desktop and mobile, but I'll have to wait until something is officially announced before I comment on it. Needless to say, working at Opera is very exciting these days.

ExtremeTech's "Which Web Browser is King?" browser comparison scores don't tell the full story...

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ExtremeTech recently tested several browsers, pitting them against each other in various tests, in an article called "Which Web Browser is King?".

While I could comment on how they are using the V8 Benchmark Suite for which V8 is specifically optimized whereas other browsers aren't, what I actually want to look at is how they distribute points for each tests. You see, slighly changing to a (IMHO) better way to distribute points changes the picture somewhat.

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Browser speed test shocker: Opera not slow after all!

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Andrew Gregory has blogged about a performance test he came across which showed Opera as consistenly being the fastest browser of the ones being tested. Unfortunately, the text of the test focuses on Firefox, and manages to claim that "performance in other browsers drops significantly" for one of the tests, apparently forgetting about Opera.

Still, it's nice to see that Opera can hold its own against other browsers.