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

61–70 of 338 posts

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#61

Post by jjoonathan »

comex wrote: post #50
jjoonathan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If process isolation is indirectly responsible for the "page freezes, doesn't re-render, doesn't respond to input" symptom then it seems to have cost more than it was worth in the stability department. Those freezes have dogged chrome on both my mac and my pc for the last 4 or 5 years every time I've tried it. Safari and firefox, OTOH, almost never seem to crash or become unresponsive. I'm all for having clever damag…

Note that Safari also uses out-of-process rendering (using WebKit2).

Well, I guess Chrome's implementation just sucks then. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#62

Post by saidajigumi »

orthecreedence wrote: post #5

Firefox is awesome and I love it, but my one complaint after all these years is that I have to restart the browser every day. It's not the end of the world, but it's still frustrating, especially when I'm in the throes of debugging or important research. Over the course of a day, the browser becomes unresponsive and CPU usage idles at 10-15%. Restarting with the same tabs brings it down to 0%. Yes, I know, disable ad…

I'll second the motion that there's something going on specifically with your setup. A reset as another poster suggests might be worth a go. Or even just creating a separate, fresh profile and trying that out for a day or two. [1]

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#63

Post by ______ »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #60
bzbarsky wrote: post #40

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.

> It's not an accident that Google's webservices work best (sometimes only) in Chrome. A web service that only works in Chrome? Maybe you mean web application (web service would be really odd to work in just one browser). Do you have a source for this regardless? I hadn't heard of this.

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

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#64

Post by BinaryIdiot »

______ wrote: post #63
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not an accident that Google's webservices work best (sometimes only) in Chrome. A web service that only works in Chrome? Maybe you mean web application (web service would be really odd to work in just one browser). Do you have a source for this regardless? I hadn't heard of this.

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.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#65

Post by letstryagain »

ooozingly wrote: post #29
Igglyboo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely curious if this is a common use case or not. I personally close chrome maybe half a dozen times an hour.

How old are you? I won't get anything done if I kept re-loading my ~200 tabs.

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?

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#66

Post by indygreg2 »

taf2 wrote: post #32
skrowl wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been reminding everyone I know who still uses Chrome to try Firefox again. Many have switched back. It's simply a better browser. One e10s is in stable, it's going to be even better. Google is a for-profit company that makes money selling your data and targeted, personal ads. Mozilla is not-for-profit and just wants to make the web better.

I don't think there is actually any evidence they use Chrome for much more than 1. disrupt IE/MS - i can say for certain they originally backed Firefox for this effort and only decided to split away to build chrome in the first place because they felt starting fresh they could build a better core and i believe they did. 2. enabling more people to build on the web, enables more of their ads to be shown. Firefox achiev…

If you sign in to Chrome, your bookmarks and full browsing history are uploaded to Google's servers. Only your passwords are encrypted locally before being sent to Google.

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/1181035 contains info on how the encryption works.

chrome://terms/ links to https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/privacy/ which links to http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/ to define "how we use information we collect." From that page: "We use the information we collect from all of our services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones, and to protect Google and our users. We also use this information to offer you tailored content – like giving you more relevant search results and ads."

Your full browsing history is a treasure trove of information useful for making Google's core services (search and ads) more effective. They would be stupid not to use it to improve the quality of their services. I challenge your assertion that Chrome is an altruistic endeavor.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#67

Post by sphink »

cromwellian wrote: post #15

"This puts us in a position of strength, so we can say "these benchmarks are not very interesting; let's talk about other benchmarks (e.g. asm.js-related) and language features" without being accused of being sore losers." But are asmjs benchmarks interesting? They are not representative of the vast majority of real-world JS, so wouldn't an asmjs-laden benchmark suite really be a case of optimizing for your own set o…

Don't look at asm.js benchmarks if you're interested in real-world JS. Look at them if you want to know something about the performance of C++ code transpiled to run in a browser, which is an interesting thing to know. And it's getting to be more and more relevant these days. (Even "real-world JS" is going to start using asm.js libraries, I bet.)

But asm.js execution is very different from JS execution, even in browsers that don't have specialized asm.js paths. Executing regular JS is all about balancing compile time and garbage collection with code execution. asm.js barely uses GC, and allows lots of opportunities to cache compilation in ways that would be invalid for regular JS. So the whole space of tradeoffs is different.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#68

Post by bzbarsky »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #60
bzbarsky wrote: post #40

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.

> It's not an accident that Google's webservices work best (sometimes only) in Chrome. A web service that only works in Chrome? Maybe you mean web application (web service would be really odd to work in just one browser). Do you have a source for this regardless? I hadn't heard of this.

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). Whether not having offline access to your mail counts as mail "not working" is up to you, I guess; for me it counts as "not working".

Various Google properties use UA sniffing to deliver degraded content to non-Chrome browsers. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=921532#c9 is an example.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=973754 is an example where as far as I can tell they built the feature around non-standard Chrome-only functionality even though Firefox supports the standard version.

Google news menus don't work in standards-compliant browsers because they rely on a Chrome/WebKit bug. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1083932

Google patent search uses UA sniffing and locks out various browsers as a result. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1013702

Google Translate will fail to work in Firefox unless you have Flash installed (good luck on Mobile).... or spoof the Chrome UA string. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=976013

They do fix these bugs sometimes (the UA sniffing ones, where they just got the sniffing flat out wrong, tend to get fixed once someone diagnoses them). And sometimes not.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#69

Post by __david__ »

gojomo wrote: post #22
Igglyboo wrote: post #17

As soon as firefox gets per process tabs in stable I'll switch back, I really want to switch from chrome but that's a deal killer for me.

I could survive without processes-per-tab, if Firefox gave some hint – any hint! – which tabs are being naughty. Maybe just a per-tab counter of allocations, or timeouts, or DOM edits, or some other operation? Anything that serves as a proxy for "more active than average while not in foreground".

Yeah, Firefox really needs some sort of "top". Right now, idling, my Firefox is taking between 20% and 40% of my CPU. I'm sure it's some tab running some dumb javascript, but there's no way for me to figure out which one. Sad, because spidermonkey must know which window a javascript context is associated with, so it could feasibly keep track of run time.
Post reply on HN