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Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

robert.ocallahan.org

111–120 of 338 posts

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do I enable the Omnibar search behavior you describe? When I enter "a" in the Omnibar, I see amazon.com in the Omnibar drop down list, but when I hit tab, Chrome just highlights the next item in the drop down list. It doesn't search Amazon. Have you manually added Amazon to Chrome's "Manage search engines" list? Firefox has something similar: "Keyword Searches" bookmarks. I define my own search shortcuts, such as…

From my experience, Chrome seems to learn about a search engine by using it. So search for something on amazon.com and it should start working.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#112
post #58

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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…

Don't forget that a large chunk of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/11/21/mozillas-reliance-g...

Isn't it actually whoever will pay the most to be the default search? I mean, I <3 google search, but i'd bet microsoft could pony up quite a bit of cash as well.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#113
post #96

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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…

I generate maybe 60 tabs a day, and finally came to the conclusion that I was using tabs incorrectly. Tree Style Tabs is great, but I found that I was using tabs as combined bookmarks + todo list. So I wrote a Firefox addon that pops up a sidebar every morning and steps through every tab prompting me to either close it or save it as a bookmark. (with tags) It has definitely helped with this vague uneasy feeling I hav…

Is that available online?

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Google never backed Firefox with a billion-dollar-a-year advertising campaign like they have Chrome for several years now. 2) It's not an accident that Google's webservices work best (sometimes only) in Chrome. They're way past the "disrupt IE" goal. They're into the "tightly couple our web service and Chrome and try to force out other options" goal.

I'd like to see a source for the billion-dollar-a-year campaign, that sounds crazy. That's 3 times Mozilla's entire budget, if memory serves me right.

The "billion dollar" number is speculation, since the Google front page ad space that Chrome got isn't for sale to anyone else. "Priceless" would possibly be more accurate.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#115
post #54

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> 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.

There could be multiple equally valid reasons for Chrome to exist.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#116
post #99

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I've been using FF for a while, but partly switched off when I got a Surface (on account of IE's better touchscreen support). But soon I'll be moving from iOS to Android, the wonderful land of being able to change your default browser. And I'll be using FF there for the bookmark syncing. Firefox on 2/3 devices ain't bad. There was a lot of hate over the australis redesign, but I like it better than Chrome.

+1 for IE's touchscreen support. I keep holding out and using Chrome on my laptop for a few extensions and all of the bookmarks/passwords I have synced over the years, but IE makes Chrome look absolutely kludgy and clunky when it comes to performance and UI these days. It's a shame IE doesn't have a more approachable extensibility model...

Does IE run on anything but Windows these days?

(Edit: Doesn't look like it. Alas.)

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#117
post #51

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> Even I know Google's policies and still choose to use Chrome purely because it's more convenient. What do you find is more convenient with Chrome over Firefox? I don't (yet) use all of the sync features in Firefox, but just having a unified history on Android and desktop is quite convenient, as is syncing saved passwords -- and knowing both how data is handled, and that I can set up a personal sync-server if I want…

Allow me to speak from the mindset of a consumer. The average consumer doesn't care about Firefox's data storage policies or how much they cooperate with the government. They care that things just work and are fast enough. For me, the convenience of Google Chrome comes from the fact that it is tightly integrated with all of Google services. I can use one Google account to log into my browser, access my email, set up…

I'd be much more interested in what you think personally, than what "a consumer" might think. I'm perfectly aware that a lot of the things that matter to me, doesn't seem to matter to a lot of people. Do I understand you correctly, in that:

1) You use gmail and Google calendar, therefore

2) You want your passwords, extensions, bookmarks and browser history synced by the same provider that provides your email and calendar hosting

3) You don't care if you can never (reasonably) move away from that provider

For you, Firefox would be as nice as Chrome, if: Firefox provided free/cheap (web)email and calendar hosting in addition to the sync services? Or if a third party offered paid hosting for Firefox sync along with (web+imap+smtp) email and calendar (ical) services? (Sounds like something fastmail should consider..?)

I'm not trying to be snarky, I just genuinely want to know in what way you think Firefox could (should) improve -- it sounds like the only thing missing is more services hosted under a single login?

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Your memory might be based on press releases, not what was actually going on. Safari and Firefox had the jits in their development builds, and were actively competing with each other, but hadn't shipped them in a final release yet at the point when the existence of Chrome was announced. Those JITs shipped a few months after that, with the attendant press hoopla.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#119
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And note that the most serious security bugs in widespread software[1] are typically exactly these common errors. Eliminating them would have prevented nearly all of the remote execution bugs in history.

1: Widespread meaning OSes and popular platforms, not custom LOB apps where SQL injection exists on the login page.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#120

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.

I agree, this is the single most lacking feature in Firefox. That said, I gladly sacrifice it to get a bit less under Google's control.
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