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What's fast about it? I see a larger download, slower to start, choppy animations, and worse performance on JS benchmarks than Firefox latest.
Before we give this the traditional Hacker News baptism by fire, keep in mind that this is apparently just one guy's project, and he's very junior: Waterfox was started back in March 2011 by Alex Kontos, a then 16 year old student. He had a fascination for the web and wanted to help expand on the ideals of what Mozilla had for a free and open web. Be constructive, not snarky.
Well, he's 20 now. And he's stuck with it for four years? That's pretty impressive.
I'm assuming the largely useless animation on the homepage is meant to make Chrome or Firefox start eating CPU and increase the perceived need for a new browser? I opened the tab, walked away for two minutes and came back to a hot and angry Chrome on my MBP.
Speed is your selling point, but I don't see any benchmarks!
~ yaourt -Ss waterfox
(err) ~
This is a huge claim to make with no evidence to back it up.
It's also a shallow comment. For one program, a compiler could compile faster code than another. Pick another another program and you may get the reverse result.
Plus I imagine the code is going to trail behind Firefox a bit. Is that worth probably a few milliseconds here and there?
I like your website though.
"What makes Waterfox so fast? It's built with Intel's C++ compiler. One of the most powerful compilers out there. This enables us to make the fastest possible web browser for all the code changes we make. This potent combination makes for an unparalleled browsing experience." Mm-Hm. How's that working out? https://www.waterfoxproject.org/blog/ "Just a quick heads up why there hasn’t been any news from me in regards t…
> Mm-Hm. How's that working out? Why so critical? He's making a bold claim, but you're not even responding to that. You're just attacking him because he's using a different compiler suite? If you know of problems with the Intel compiler suite, how about you let us know what they are instead of passively aggressively pointing to a single recent problem which from the bug report I'm not sure is the fault of Intel's com…
Utter bullshit.
Google: "Download Firefox". Click first link. Click "Systems & Languages".
I'm assuming the largely useless animation on the homepage is meant to make Chrome or Firefox start eating CPU and increase the perceived need for a new browser? I opened the tab, walked away for two minutes and came back to a hot and angry Chrome on my MBP.
Is the Intel Compiler even appreciably faster these days? I thought CLang and GCC had basically caught up...
It can be for compute bound processes compiled on and for the latest Xeon servers. But, for end user apps with syscalls everywhere, I don't think the difference is notably different.
I paused when I read Intel compiler - that thing is a steaming pile of crap, or at least was for godawful number of releases for a long time and I don't expect it to ever work in the real world with a non-trivial amount of C++ code base. And then I read about a Mozilla header causing it to ICE! Years ago, I was forced to make a company's product faster by "simply" recompiling it with ICC. It was losing in the benchma…
I had the exact opposite experience with Intel's "steaming pile of crap" as you put it. We had a computationally intensive app that was sped up by 25% compared to the version produced by MS compiler. This was few years ago though.
For us, the performance was worth the effort of working around the bugs. But that's probably not the case for most projects.