Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

robert.ocallahan.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 338 posts

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#101

Post by haberman »

pcwalton wrote: post #81
bzbarsky wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean the services Google provides to users in the form of web applications, yes. The terminology is sucky. As for concrete examples, Hangouts only works in non-Chrome browsers (including ones with WebRTC support) if you install a Google-provided binary blob. Which you may not be able to do. Gmail only supports offline access in Chrome (see https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6557?hl=en the "two exceptions" bit).…

Google Inbox is also Chrome-only. It UA sniffs and tells you to download Chrome if you aren't using it.

For non-nefarious reasons: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495939

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#102

Post by jbkkd »

MichaelGG wrote: post #39
rdtsc wrote: post #3

I have been very impressed by Firefox lately. Kudos to the whole team at Mozilla. Just about 5 years ago, it was looking to me like it was the end of Firefox. It was Chrome all the way. New features were coming out one after another. Faster rendering. Safe process isolation for each tab. Looked better. But I just switched back last month. It happened kind of randomly. Saw an announcement of a new release ( 33, I thin…

Same here. Especially as Google becomes more and more evil, Chrome looks less attractive. Even on mobile, I use FF, despite it needing a lot of work and having a lot of rendering and input issues. And Chrome on Android looks very sexy. On desktop, FF is fine, once more. Rust is also one of the most promising languages with a potentially massive impact on the world. Not only safer software, but exposing more programme…

> safer software What makes Rust-written software safer?

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#103

Post by wldcordeiro »

quaunaut wrote: post #86
CarlHoerberg wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fixed in 33: http://msujaws.wordpress.com/2014/08/01/faster-and-snappier-...

That doesn't really fix what I like most. I like being able to hit a, see Amazon.com hilighted, hit tab, and have that be searching Amazon. Or to do the same thing with GMail, Wikipedia, Youtube. It's the core functionality I like most with Chrome.

You can do that in Firefox and with more granular control. If you right click in a search box you can choose to "Add a keyword for this search" and then you can make the keyword whatever you choose.

For example: I have a folder in my bookmarks containing like Youtube which is this url https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&oq=&gs_l= associated with the keyword "yt" so I can type yt and it loads the Youtube results. I've also added one for the Mozilla Developer Network (mdn ), Python Documentation (py2 or py3 ) and I add others as I use them more.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#104

Post by shadowmint »

jbkkd wrote: post #102
MichaelGG wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. Especially as Google becomes more and more evil, Chrome looks less attractive. Even on mobile, I use FF, despite it needing a lot of work and having a lot of rendering and input issues. And Chrome on Android looks very sexy. On desktop, FF is fine, once more. Rust is also one of the most promising languages with a potentially massive impact on the world. Not only safer software, but exposing more programme…

> safer software What makes Rust-written software safer?

This has been covered repeatedly in the past. Rust inherently helps to prevent many types of memory related and concurrency errors.

Rust programs are not 'safe' in the sense that they cannot crash or have security bugs, but they are 'safer' in that the compiler automatically performs a series of safety checks to prevent common errors.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#105

Post by dscrd »

jbkkd wrote: post #102
MichaelGG wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. Especially as Google becomes more and more evil, Chrome looks less attractive. Even on mobile, I use FF, despite it needing a lot of work and having a lot of rendering and input issues. And Chrome on Android looks very sexy. On desktop, FF is fine, once more. Rust is also one of the most promising languages with a potentially massive impact on the world. Not only safer software, but exposing more programme…

> safer software What makes Rust-written software safer?

Option types and safe pointers, and modern abstractions. Some other programming languages offer these too, but Rust attempts to do them while incurring no run-time costs.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#106

Post by wyager »

jbkkd wrote: post #102
MichaelGG wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. Especially as Google becomes more and more evil, Chrome looks less attractive. Even on mobile, I use FF, despite it needing a lot of work and having a lot of rendering and input issues. And Chrome on Android looks very sexy. On desktop, FF is fine, once more. Rust is also one of the most promising languages with a potentially massive impact on the world. Not only safer software, but exposing more programme…

> safer software What makes Rust-written software safer?

It is effectively impossible to have an unsafe memory access error in Rust. The compiler eliminates a huge variety of bug types, including null pointer dereferences, use-after-free bugs, memory leaks, etc. All arrays are bounds-checked and rust encourages good programming practice like using abstracted list-processing mechanisms (like mapping instead of loops) and algebraic types instead of e.g. null pointers.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#107

Post by comex »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #64
______ wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An example of this is Google Drive's offline mode, which only runs on Chrome ( https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2375012?hl=en )

I can't entirely blame them for this one considering the alternative is either using something standard (localStorage) where they're only going to be able to store a really insignificant amount of information or creating something proprietary for multiple web browsers which is difficult to maintain. If there was a web standard way of caching 5GB of files locally then I would be annoyed.

IndexedDB is supported on all major browsers by now.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#108

Post by IvyMike »

jacquesm wrote: post #82
IvyMike wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There never was a good reason for Chrome to exist in the first place. Chrome kicked off the browser performance wars, especially javascript. A fast and performant web was important to any strategy Google could have had, regardless of their status as a good or evil company.

Chrome does not exist to give the world a fast and performant web, it exists to give google full control over the audience from request to delivery, it exists to increase google's control and serves as a collection mechanism for data that it would not otherwise get at. That it's a performant browser is a side-effect.

> data that it would not otherwise get at.

My argument is that nobody would have put that data online in a slow and sucky web. If you think Google wants full control over the audience, surely they also want a large audience.

(Note that I do not think that Google is evil. But if they were, I don't think they would need chrome to get most of that information anyways, given all the other ways they are collecting data. Sure, there are some corner cases they would miss but I don't think the incremental coverage would be worth the effort.)

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#109

Post by IvyMike »

bzbarsky wrote: post #80
IvyMike wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There never was a good reason for Chrome to exist in the first place. Chrome kicked off the browser performance wars, especially javascript. A fast and performant web was important to any strategy Google could have had, regardless of their status as a good or evil company.

Please check your history. There was a JavaScript performance war in full swing, with both Firefox and Safari producing new JITs and working on improving them, before Chrome ever appeared.

My memory was that there was a cold war, but not hot-and-heavy competition until chrome, although this article seems to agree with you.

But man, Chrome sure got good fast.

http://www.cnet.com/news/browser-war-centers-on-once-obscure...

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#110

Post by grecy »

lumpypua wrote: post #78
letstryagain wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have 200 tabs open? How do you find the tab you want? How often do you look at each of the 200 tabs? What happens when you're on another computer? What happens if you accidentally close Chrome, do you open all 200 tabs again?

You have 200 tabs open? 120-200 in each Chrome, FF, Safari. How do you find the tab you want? For me each window has tabs on a particular topic, e.g. database api docs plus stack overflow (10 tabs), a javascript one (7 tabs), hackernews (18 tabs), paleo recipes (12 tabs), etc. Tab creation and deletion basically acts like a stack with the most recent/specific tab on top—and I'll garbage collect (command-w a bunch of…

Genuinely curious as I thought I was a heavy tab user.

What do you use 18 tabs of hackernews for?

I often have the front page in one and my threads in another.. then at least a few comments pages in others.. but never more than 5-6.

Post reply on HN