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Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#91

Post by SwellJoe »

I switched back to Firefox from Chrome a couple years ago, because I no longer trust Google to have my best interests at heart. It's been fine; I have a beefy machine with plenty of RAM, but I also use it on my horribly slow Android phone (an old HTC Sensation 4G that has never been worth a crap), and it works OK there, too.

My only complaint is that it requires a plugin to get a reasonable number of tabs in a window before requiring scrolling. It's downright absurd that it stopped being configurable many, many, many versions ago.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#92

Post by xooyoozoo »

Sephr wrote: post #89

Octane now includes asm.js benchmarks, and V8 doesn't attempt to support "use asm". This gives SpiderMonkey an advantage in the benchmark. I think it's quite impressive how close V8 is in performance to SpiderMonkey which actually goes out of it's way to support "use asm".

Octane is Google's own benchmark suite. I don't think getting beaten on your own hand-picked set of performance metrics satisfies any definition of "impressive".

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#93

Post by cddotdotslash »

e12e wrote: post #51
cddotdotslash wrote: post #45

While this is great for those keeping track of the stats, I doubt it will have much effect on the average consumer. Almost everyone I know uses Chrome; that includes family members, co-workers, tech-minded and non-tech-minded people alike. For them, it's been IE vs Chrome for awhile and telling them "Firefox is a tad bit faster" isn't enough to make them switch again. Unfortunately, I think Firefox lost too many peop…

> 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 a calendar, etc. Sure, Firefox can do syncing too, I just prefer using one company that does it all rather than two that do half.

Also, unrelated, I think Firefox spent too long copying Google Chrome's interface and now they are playing catch up.

Regardless, Firefox usage continues to decline month after month. I think they've lost the general consumer appeal.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#94

Post by oceanstone »

indygreg2 wrote: post #66
taf2 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Don't forget about omnibox predictions. By default, all keystrokes in the address bar are being sent, even while you're logged out.

References:

"Get predictions in the address bar" https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95656?hl=en

"Logging policies for omnibox predictions" https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/180655?hl=en

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#95

Post by keypusher »

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've heard other people say this too, but it must be a workflow or use case thing. I run Firefox as my browser of choice on Linux, Mac, and Windows every day, and have for 10 years at least. I do remember a time when memory was an issue, but those problems have been resolved for a few years. I routinely have dozens of tabs open, often with Flash video or lots of javascript, sometimes 50 or more (with the excellent TreeStyleTabs plugin for hierarchical side tabs) and I have never had these problems. I restart my browser maybe once a month, usually along with OS updates.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#96

Post by mnutt »

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…

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 have about occasionally restarting Firefox and having to automatically reopen hundreds of tabs, most of which could have long ago been garbage collected.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#97

Post by cpeterso »

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.

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 "am" for Amazon, "imdb" for IMDB, "nf" for Netflix, and "w" for Wikipedia. Using "am Harry Potter" or imdb or nf or w will use those respective website's own search forms to find "Harry Potter".

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#98

Post by MichaelGG »

wlesieutre wrote: post #42
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…

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.

Android is also the land where almost every single app can see who you call, who calls you, and get a unique serial number for your phone hardware. All because Google smuggled "check to see if the user's on the phone" permission, which many apps rightfully need, into that whole bundle.

As this is technically a very stupid move, it feels like the only way to interpret this is that Google wants more people giving up privacy, for it to be normal.

Also see: Chrome flips around OK/Cancel in the DNT enable dialog, purely to confuse and prevent users from enabling DNT.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#99

Post by Encosia »

wlesieutre wrote: post #42
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…

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...
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