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RenderingNG: An architecture that makes and keeps Chrome fast for the long term

blog.chromium.org

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Re: RenderingNG: An architecture that makes and keeps Chrome fast for the long term

#51

Rendering is fast on Chrome, however latency is high: Chrome has 1 to 2 frames (17ms to 33ms on a 60Hz display) of additional, unnecessary input lag when compared to Firefox: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=460919

The linked vsync-tester[1] is very cool. But it's sad to see that (at least on my system) nothing has changed since 2012[2] - Firefox still misses frames; Chrome consistently lags an extra frame.

[1] https://www.vsynctester.com/

[2] https://phoboslab.org/log/2012/06/measuring-input-lag-in-bro...

Re: RenderingNG: An architecture that makes and keeps Chrome fast for the long term

#52

How come processors and browsers become faster every year but the internet feels as slow and bloated as ever? How long can this x% faster continue? There must be some theoretical optimum, how far are we away?

Not just the internet: case in point, the new Xcode 13 has some really embarassing performance problems on my mid-2014 13"MBP. I guess the Xcode team switched to shiny new M1 Macs between Xcode 12 and 13.

Back in 1980s and 90s I had MS Quick C 1.0 and Borland Turbo Pascal 3.0-5.5. On my 386 system back in early 90s, these used to be super fast with most of the small hobby programs I wrote then. Type program name on MS dos command prompt, press enter and you can start coding or editing your file in WP or 123 in the blink of an eye. Press key combo to run program in debug mode and it would be ready in less than 1 second.

That system did run Windows 3.0, and later on 3.1 & Windows 95, but for a lot of tasks I would just use MSDOS and be done with that. Even running character mode Linux with pre 1.0 kernel in multiuser mode was fairly snappy in those days.

The first generation unibody macbook pros running OSX felt fairly fast and snappy back in the day, but even that was no match to the peak MSDOS speed. And I suppose that snappiness was felt mostly because Windows XP while fast, was not the snappiest OS out there.

In 2021 with every component seemingly 100x faster than those systems, with a 8 core i9 CPU on my MBP 16, I dont see any environment being that fast. I really miss peak MSDOS experience from the days of Windows 3.0 era.

Re: RenderingNG: An architecture that makes and keeps Chrome fast for the long term

#53
>A great way Chrome can render content faster is to take advantage of the multi-core CPUs and advanced GPUs present in today’s devices. Multi-core means we can do multiple kinds of work in parallel. For example, Chrome parallelizes running JavaScript, scrolling a web page, decoding an image or video,

I've noticed that Firefox is not as smooth as Chrome when playing 4k video. This has been an ongoing issue experienced by many for several years: https://www.google.com/search?q=firefox+4k+video+stutters

I just re-tested this on the latest Firefox 93.0 and while it pegs an entire cpu, the playback performance is still jerky and unusable. And changing the oft-suggested setting of "gfx.webrender.all = true" still doesn't resolve it.

I don't know what Chrome is doing differently but 4k playback just works with the default settings.

Re: RenderingNG: An architecture that makes and keeps Chrome fast for the long term

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Popular apps will be as slow as user can tolerate. Because if they're not slow enough, it invites developers to introduce another abstraction layer. Good thing is, that it's possible to create truly groundbreaking apps using non-conventional techniques, as web becomes faster and richer with new APIs. For example with Wasm and WebGPU it's possible to create AAA games running in the browser. Someone will do it. It'll b…

>For example with Wasm and WebGPU it's possible to create AAA games running in the browser. Someone will do it. It'll be awesome. You get a shitty distribution model (relying on browser for cache or limited localstorage, or whatever you want it's shitty in the browser and inconsistent, browsers aren't built to handle GB sized assets). You pay the sandbox tax even in the ideal scenario and there are plenty pathologica…

Some people can't wait until all games are proper Electron apps

Re: RenderingNG: An architecture that makes and keeps Chrome fast for the long term

#56
post #33

How come processors and browsers become faster every year but the internet feels as slow and bloated as ever? How long can this x% faster continue? There must be some theoretical optimum, how far are we away?

Https multiplied latency by three when opening websites compared to 10/15years ago where many websites were http. And also many websites include more tracking, for example Google search results used to directly send you to the result page. Now they first send you to Google so that they know you clicked but it also adds noticeable latency.

With the advent of CDNs, edge routing and global hosting, things have actually gotten way better for those of us who use US based websites from the other side of the world. I am from India and back in 1990s the latency used to be huge because we had internet via satellite. Then we got internet via submarine cables but even with that latency is > 300ms for a server based in the US.

Now in 2021, most popular websites use CDNs and have servers based out datacentres closer to India and the page load speed and latency has gone down significantly for us.

But page bloat is a different matter, I still remember spending the greater part of a day (or maybe more0 downloading the MSIE 2.0 installer on a 1200bps dial up modem. Today page sizes > 1mb are common even on mobile sites.

Re: RenderingNG: An architecture that makes and keeps Chrome fast for the long term

#57

Distinguish _to be_ and _to become_. The latter is only possible if you _are not already_. Safari is efficient. Chrome becomes efficient. The latter is only possible if Chrome isn’t efficient currently.

I still dont understand why people call chrome a memory hog and safari efficient. Try loading Outlook on the web or confluence and you will see that both Safari and Chrome eat up tons of RAM and cpu.

Re: RenderingNG: An architecture that makes and keeps Chrome fast for the long term

#58
post #39
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t intend this as facetious, but how many years do you expect closed-source OS vendors to support their first-party hardware?

not OP, but for the lifetime of the hardware ? or, at least, should be specified in T&C when buying the hardware I am still pissed off that my 2012 Macbook Air is no longer receiving OS updates - compare that to Microsoft that allows me to run windows on basically any PC

Not anymore. Windows 11 requires 8-th generation which was released in 2017.

Re: RenderingNG: An architecture that makes and keeps Chrome fast for the long term

#59

How come processors and browsers become faster every year but the internet feels as slow and bloated as ever? How long can this x% faster continue? There must be some theoretical optimum, how far are we away?

The only solution to that is if the browser starts absorbing more of the stuff that developers now use javascript for, like UI components etc.

Designers will wrinkle their noses at standard components and will ask something custom to stand out.

Re: RenderingNG: An architecture that makes and keeps Chrome fast for the long term

#60

Rendering is fast on Chrome, however latency is high: Chrome has 1 to 2 frames (17ms to 33ms on a 60Hz display) of additional, unnecessary input lag when compared to Firefox: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=460919

Reading that thread, it seems that Firefox has some other tradeoffs, but I might be wrong.

https://youtu.be/E3wTajGZOsA

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