Live data from Hacker News

Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

robert.ocallahan.org

71–80 of 338 posts

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#71
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There never was a good reason for Chrome to exist in the first place. Content companies should not produce browsers, it is too much of a temptation for them to optimize their content for their own browser and vv.

> 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.

I agree. IE kicked everyone else's butt first (in terms of market share), and the Web stagnated. Then Firefox kicked IE's butt, and the Web didn't stagnate quite as much, but let's be honest -- it stagnated. At the moment, Chrome is dominant but no browser is really trampling its competition, especially not in terms of overall quality. And the Web is improving faster than it ever has. (Well, not quite -- the "catch up" phases of the browser wars probably saw faster improvement while they were happening.)

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#72
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point in this one is SpiderMonkey is beating V8 in the benchmark designed such that V8 wins on it.

Yeah, no. They chose intensive process, many of them are ports of code from other languages and some the tests are using software made by Mozilla such as pdf.jz and zlib (Ecmascripten) and Microsoft (Typescript compiler) https://developers.google.com/octane/benchmark

But they also included stuff like splay-latency which explicitly tests something that doesn't matter on the Web (support for incremental GC during script execution, which doesn't matter in browsers because the effects of a script are never made visible to the user until the script ends). Guess what, V8 has that and Spidermonkey doesn't.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#73
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…

I'm using Opera instead of Chrome. I use Chrome Canary for web dev, but Opera is basically Chrome sans-Google. It's got all the same features as Chrome as it's based on Chromium. Just none of the Google account features. I've also dumped gmail for fastmail and am trying out duckduckgo, but if that doesn't work out I'll just use Google in an incognito window.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#74

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.

365 days a year for several years Google has had a Chrome banner ad on www.google.com showing to Firefox users. That page is the most lucrative property on the web in terms of eyeballs, so take your most outrageous ad rate you can find and do the math. It's billions per year worth of advertising.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#75
post #58

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…

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

It makes me happy that a chunk of Google's money is being used for Mozilla's purposes.

(Disclaimer: as a Mozilla employee, that includes my salary :)

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#76
post #38

Mozilla is one organization that I have no problems supporting. Thanks to everyone involved with Mozilla for contributing to a great organization that does awesome stuff.

I pointed my smile.amazon.com account at the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation.

(Which isn't entirely altruistic; I am employed by the Mozilla Corporation. But hey, I do support Mozilla's mission; what can I say?)

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#77
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience, with vanilla firefox on a desktop (linux, i7), 1 tab with twitter open takes about that much processor power.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 tabs) when I finish with the specific task.

What happens when you're on another computer?

Laptop goes everywhere with me. 99.5% of the time I'm not. But that other computer also has fuckton of tabs open. lol

What happens if you accidentally close Chrome, do you open all 200 tabs again?

Yup. Various plugins make it less painful but it does hurt. I make sure not to accidentally close the browser.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#79

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.

> I'd like to see a source for the billion-dollar-a-year campaign

I can't find a source for the figure right now, unfortunately. And the whole thing is a guess, since Google doesn't release this information. All it releases is overall sales/marketing spending, which in 2012 was about $6 billion if I understand right (see " rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/How-much-does-Google-spend-on-advertisi...). That includes salaries for the marketing folks, etc, not just direct spending on campaigns.

As I recall, the $1b estimate broke down something like 30% actual spend (primetime TV ads, ads all over the London Tube, etc, etc) and 70% in-kind placement (i.e. "every search you do on Google with another browser shoves an ad for Chrome in your face"). I'll see if I can hunt down where I saw that...

> That's 3 times Mozilla's entire budget

Yep.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#80
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There never was a good reason for Chrome to exist in the first place. Content companies should not produce browsers, it is too much of a temptation for them to optimize their content for their own browser and vv.

> 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.
Post reply on HN