New Chrome 5 stable released today: Welcome, Mac and Linux!

Tuesday, May 25, 2010 | 8:59 AM

In our most recent beta release, we fired up all engines to bring to life our fastest version of Chrome to date.

Today, we’re bringing all this beta goodness to the stable channel so that it’s available to all Chrome users. We’re particularly excited to bring Chrome for Mac and Linux out of beta, and introduce Chrome’s first stable release for Mac and Linux users. You can read more about the Mac and Linux stable releases on the Google Mac and Chromium blogs respectively.

Today’s stable release also comes with a host of new features. You’ll be able to synchronize not only bookmarks across multiple computers, but also browser preferences -- including themes, homepage and startup settings, web content settings, preferred languages, and even page zoom settings. Meanwhile, for avid extensions users, you can enable each extension to work in incognito mode through the extensions manager.

Our stable release also incorporates HTML5 features such as Geolocation APIs, App Cache, web sockets, and file drag-and-drop. For a taste of HTML5’s powerful features, try browsing through websites developed in HTML5 such as scribd.com, dragging and dropping attachments in Gmail, or by enabling the geolocation functionality in Google Maps. We’ve also given Chrome’s bookmark manager a facelift with HTML5:

Pedal to the Chrome metal: Our fastest beta to date for Windows, Mac and Linux

Tuesday, May 4, 2010 | 8:31 AM

Here in Aarhus, Denmark -- home of the V8 project, Chrome’s JavaScript engine -- we’ve been tuning, testing, and polishing the V8 engine to give Chrome a hefty boost in speed.

Today’s new beta release incorporates one of Chrome’s most significant speed and performance increases to date, with 30% and 35% improvement on the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks over the previous beta channel release. In fact, looking back in time, Chrome’s performance has improved by as much as 213% and 305% on these two benchmarks since our very first beta.





Today’s beta release also includes a handful of new features. Not too long ago, we introduced bookmark sync into the browser, which allows you to keep your bookmarks synchronized on multiple computers using your Google Account. Beta users can now synchronize not only bookmarks, but also browser preferences including themes, homepage and startup settings, web content settings, and language. By popular demand especially from avid Chrome extensions users, you can now install and use Chrome extensions while in incognito mode.

Under the hood, today’s release contains the goodness of some new HTML5 features, namely Geolocation APIs, App Cache, web sockets, and file drag-and-drop capabilities. Additionally, this is the first Chrome beta that features initial integration of the Adobe Flash Player plug-in with Chrome, so that you can browse a rich, dynamic web with added security and stability -- you’ll automatically receive security and feature updates for Flash Player with Chrome’s auto-update mechanism.

To try out all these new features, download Chrome on the Windows beta channel, or download the Mac or Linux betas.

Lastly, with this beta’s crazy speed improvements, we designed a series of equally unconventional speed tests for the browser. While the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks have their strengths, we felt that more could be done to measure speed on the browser. Here’s an early preview of how we designed, built, and implemented these speed tests. Stay tuned for the full results; we’ll post them here tomorrow.



Source: The Chrome Blog http://chrome.blogspot.com/

Here is the download link:

http://www.google.com/chrome?platform=linux

Chrome 5: Faster and better

Chrome 5: Faster and better
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, Cyber Cynic-Computer World

The first thing you'll notice with Google's new beta of its Chrome Web browser is that it's faster -- much faster -- than the last version. You don't need any fancy tests to see that. All you have to do is use it, and you'll see that it blows other browsers away.

But if numbers are what you want, here's what I found using the SunSpider JavaScript benchmarks. I ran these tests on a pair of Dell 530S desktop PCs. These older computers are powered by a 2.2GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800MHz front-side bus. Each has 4GB of RAM, a 500GB SATA (Serial ATA) drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) chipset. One was loaded with Windows XP SP3 and the other used MEPIS 8.0 desktop Linux. First, I ran the benchmarks with an old copy of Chrome 4, which I installed just for these tests, and then with Chrome 5.0.375.29, the latest beta. The average result was 660.4ms for Chrome 4 and 380.0 for Chrome 5.

Other Chrome tests haven't shown such significant improvements, but the bottom line is that the new Chrome is visibly faster than most other browsers. While it's true that Opera Software's Opera 10.53 is faster still, it's also true that Opera has been plagued with numerous serious security problems. For the best combination of speed and security you can't currently beat Chrome.



For sheer silliness, and to get an idea of just how fast Chrome really is in a very visual way, check out Google's Chrome video of Chrome pages loading with potato guns firing and Tesla coils blasting model pirate ships in the foreground.

The new Chrome has more than just speed and security going for it though. It also includes several new features. The one I like the most is expanding Chrome's bookmark sync, from just letting you keep your bookmarks in sync with multiple computers to letting you sync browser preferences such as themes, homepage and startup settings, and Web content settings across PCs. If you're like me and you use several computers this is one handy feature.

It also includes several HTML5 features such as Geolocation APIs (application programming interfaces), App Cache -- HTML5's answer to the old Google Gears for offline Web applications -- and file drag-and-drop capabilities.

This is also the first version of Chrome where, as promised, Adobe Flash Player is built-in. While Flash has recently had more than its fair share of serious security problems, bundling them together is probably a good thing since Chrome quietly and automatically updates itself, and now Flash, as soon as fixes are available. Considering how many security holes are exploited simply because users can't be bothered to update their software, I like Google's automatic update model.

What it all comes down to me is that Chrome is continuing to become my favorite Web browser. I still have lingering fondness for Firefox, but Chrome, which also runs on Linux, Macs, and Windows is moving into first place in the browser races.

http://www.google.com/chrome

Firefox 4 guns for speed

Mozilla hopes to release Firefox 4 in October or November, a new version that has speed among its top goals. -from Zdnet.com

"Performance is a huge, huge, huge thing for us," said Mike Beltzner, vice president of engineering for Firefox, in a webcast on Tuesday about plans for the browser. "We created the performance story, and we've got to keep at it."

Among other features planned for Firefox 4 — and Mozilla emphatically cautions that plans can change — are support for high-speed graphics and text through Direct2D on Windows; a tidier user interface with more prominent and powerful tabs; support for several newer web technologies; 64-bit versions; and compatibility with multi-touch interfaces.

Performance means any number of things in a browser. Among them: the time it takes to launch the program or to load a web page, the responsiveness of the user interface to commands such as opening new tabs, and the speed with which web-based JavaScript programs execute. Firefox programmers also will work on more perceptual speed improvements, Beltzner said, such as changing the order that web page elements appear on the screen and the appearance of the page-loading progress bar.

Mozilla's Firefox 4 design shows tabs above the address bar and a home-page button replaced by a home tab.
(Credit: Mozilla)

Speed is only one item on a long list of changes Mozilla has in mind for its five-year-old open-source Firefox browser. Improving Firefox is arguably a greater challenge now, though, for several reasons.

Below is  an early screen shot of Firefox 4 for Windows 7 showing the tabs above the address bar:

And with the bookmarks bar"

Below is Firefox 4 with tabs below the address bar under Windows 7:

And with the bookmarks toolbar shown:

First, there's new energy in competitors including Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 and Chrome from web powerhouse Google. Second, making abrupt changes is harder without ruffling feathers among its large user base — Firefox accounts for roughly a quarter of the browser usage worldwide. Third, Firefox is expanding from PCs to mobile phones and tablets with very different hardware requirements. Last, a long list of new technologies are profoundly transforming browsers into a foundation for web applications, but many of those advancements are far from settled. Beltzner recognises the challenges.

"We are in it to win it," Beltzner said. "It's no longer the case where it's all easy wins. There's hard work to be done here. We have to make sure we're the ones leading the charge in keeping the web open for users."

Scheduling

Mozilla established a Firefox 3.6, 3.7 and 4.0 release plan in 2009, but the organisation warned early this year that the browser schedule was changing. Tuesday's webcast offered a new schedule with no Firefox 3.7.

One key feature of 3.7 called out-of-process plug-ins, which moves plug-ins such as Adobe Systems' Flash Player to their own separate memory area for better stability, was advanced to Firefox 3.6.4, code-named Lorentz and in beta testing right now. Meanwhile, Mozilla concluded it needed more time for a planned user-interface overhaul and to be liberated by a "rebooted" plan for a new extensions foundation called Jetpack.

"I think we need to get to a first beta by the end of June", before the Mozilla Summit in early July, he said. Releasing that version "puts us in a position where we can ship [the final version] somewhere in October or November".

Mozilla's new schedule for releasing Firefox 4 — if all goes well....November 2010.
(Credit: Mozilla)

Given past experience, this deadline may not be met. Firefox 3.6 had been due in that time frame in 2009 and slipped into early 2010. "This is an aggressive schedule to be sure. We have to focus the efforts of projects already under way so it can come together to be a really great Firefox 4," Beltzner said. And programmers will have to prove the merit of any new projects very soon if they want them included.

So what else is new?

Beltzner grouped the Firefox 4 plan into three broad areas of interest: features for browser users, features for web developers, and underlying platform features.

Tabs are one area of change for users. Tabs will be above the address bar, as is the case with Chrome, and a home tab replaces the home button. In addition, narrower application tabs can be dedicated to various web apps. Instead of a menu bar across the top, there's a single Firefox button with a drop-down menu. Typing in the address bar can be used to switch to other tabs.

One change that had been bandied about, though — a unification of the address bar and the search bar, a la Chrome — didn't appear in Beltzner's designs.

Mozilla hopes to change some dialog boxes to make them more effective. Two examples are the option for Firefox to remember a website's password and to permit a website to use the browser user's physical location.

Planned for Firefox 4 will be a more elaborate mechanism to see what privileges a person has granted to various websites.
(Credit: Mozilla)

Mozilla has always been motivated by the idea of giving the user control, and it's hoping the new Firefox will go further with a revamped control panel for managing passwords, cookies, pop-up blocking, geolocation, local data storage, and related details. Users could see what permissions have been granted to websites for each category, or alternatively, see which various permissions a specific site has.

Below is an early screen shot of Firefox 4 running on Linux with a brown theme:

Significant changes to the user interface can lead to confusion, but in the long run, the pain can be worthwhile, Beltzner said. Sometimes, he said, "we're going to have to do the uncomfortable thing."

For developers, Mozilla also has a number of features planned for Firefox 4.
For web applications, the Firefox 4 plan includes support for WebSockets, a mechanism for easier communication between the browser and a web server. And as for dealing with the new class of touch-enabled devices, which often don't have a keyboard or mouse, Firefox should be able to let web developers build pages controlled with a multi-touch interface.

The heart of web programming is Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and Mozilla is building into Firefox a new HTML5 "parser", the part of the browser that interprets the web page code. The new parser can handle Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and mathematical equations interleaved with the rest of a web page, runs as a separate computing process to improve browser responsiveness, and fixes "dozens" of long-standing bugs on the previous parser, Mozilla said.

In industry shorthand, HTML5 often stands for many new technologies that aren't part of the actual HTML5 specification or even the broader HTML renovation effort.
Firefox 4 will support some of those, too, but two important ones are only tentative at this stage: the newer Indexed DB effort designed to improve how information from a website is stored locally on a computer, and the WebGL effort to build hardware-accelerated 3D graphics into the web. Required driver support for graphics chips complicates WebGL, and the Indexed DB specification isn't likely to be finished in time, Beltzner said.

For the movement to sidestep Flash with web technologies, Firefox 4 has a few features planned. Some newer aspects of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), used for formatting, are set to be supported, including transitions that can animate the transformation of one web element into another. Firefox 4 also is expected to support more of the newer CSS3 specification.

Areas of Firefox that Mozilla is hoping to improve
(Credit: Mozilla)

Also stepping on Flash's toes will be support for SMIL, the Synchronised Multimedia Integration Language that can be used for some animation chores, and faster performance with the 2D drawing interface called Canvas.

Under the hood

Performance improvements to Firefox will come through improvements to the underlying software. One significant change coming is JaegerMonkey, which combines Firefox's current JavaScript engine with elements of those used in Chrome and Safari browsers.
"JaegerMonkey has reached a halfway point: we've closed about half the performance gap between our baseline performance and the competition," JaegerMonkey programmer David Mandelin said in a blog post on Monday. However, he added, "you can build a browser with JM [JaegerMonkey] today, but you probably won't get too far before crashing. Fixing that is next on my list."

Also on the Firefox 4 plan is support for 64-bit processors. Operating systems have now made the jump in earnest, but not all software has followed suit.
Other hardware changes planned for Firefox 4 include support for Direct2D on Windows, a feature that lets the browser tap into the engine for hardware-accelerated graphics and text. That support exists on Windows 7 and the latest service pack of Vista, but here again, "driver hell" is a risk.

Support for Windows 7 interface features including Aero peek, jump lists, and icons with progress bars are also on the to-do list for Firefox 4.
Support for cameras and microphones is only a tentative goal, as is tighter integration with Mac OS X.

Below are some early Mac OSX Firefox 4 design screen shots with tabs below:

And with the bookmarks bar:

Firefox 4 will offer tabs at the top of the address bar seen below:

And with the bookmarks bar:

 Deeper under the covers, for security and stability reasons, Mozilla is splitting Firefox into separate memory areas with a project called Electrolysis. Its first element, out-of-process plug-ins (OOPP), is the chief feature of Firefox 3.6.4, but more is planned for Firefox 4. The new Jetpack interface moves add-ons to a separate memory area, too. Firefox 4, though, won't get the broader sandboxing design in Google's Chrome, in which browser tabs are separated from one other.

These plumbing details might sound arcane, but they're important as browsers become a foundation for ever-increasing amounts of computing chores. A Monday blog post from Firefox programmer Vladimir Vukicevic captured the essence of the matter.

"Today's web browser is in many ways acting like a miniature full operating system," Vukicevic said.

Source: http://www.zdnet.com.au/firefox-4-guns-for-speed-339303057.htm

Google's good news: Microsoft cannibalizes Yahoo search share

Google's good news: Microsoft cannibalizes Yahoo search share
By Joe Wilcox | Published April 28, 2010, 10:23 PM- from Betanews.com


Microsoft sure is gaining search share fast. Too bad it's cannibalizing Yahoo rather than gaining on Google.

Today, Nielsen released March 2010 US search share numbers, and, whoa, are they good news-bad news for Microsoft. The good news: Microsoft search share is 12.2 percent. The bad news: Microsoft closed the gap on Yahoo to within 1.2 percent. Yahoo's search share is 13.4 percent.

A year ago, these gains would have been great cheering within the hallowed halls of Microsoft's campus. But Yahoo is Microsoft's new search partner. The two companies announced the deal, which will eventually hand over responsibility for Yahoo search to Microsoft, in July 2009. Cannibalization is not good for Yahoo, either. How can Yahoo make gobs of money from its Microsoft-powered search deal if Microsoft gobbles up search share?

How much Pac-Man-like gobbling is that? According to Nielsen, in April 2009, Yahoo's US search share was a healthier 16.3 percent, while Microsoft had 9.9 percent share. Microsoft's month-on-month search share increases -- cannibalization of Yahoo share -- are much stronger in 2010 than December 2009. More problematic, Microsoft gains are taking nothing from Google. In April 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo had combined search share of 26.2 percent. March 2010: 25.6 percent. Google: 64 percent in April 2009 and 65.7 percent in March 2010. But the gains aren't all cannibalization. Microsoft also appears to be nipping search share from some smaller search engines.

For more perspective, Nielsen also released number of searches. Americans conducted 9.72 billion searches last month. Microsoft-Yahoo combined, for March 2010: About 2.5 billion searches. Google: 6.5 billion. Microsoft-Yahoo combined April 2009: 2.26 billion searches. Google: 5.5 billion searches. So searches at Microhoo were lower 11 months earlier, but search share higher.

March 2010 US Search Share



Oh, yeah, Bing advertising is helping Microsoft to convert search users. Too bad, most are coming from Microsoft's new search partner and not its arch rival. In July 2009 post "Microsoft-Yahoo deal is Google's Christmas-in-July present," I warned that the search agreement would likely lead to search cannibalization. But even before the deal is complete, Microsoft is gobble, gobble, gobbling share because of its marketing, branding and search service success with Bing.

Cannibalization already could be seen when the companies announced the search agreement. I wrote in July 2009:

Further cannibalization is inevitable, and there is likely to be heaps of it. Matters would have been worse had Microsoft bought Yahoo and consolidated all search under a single brand. My prediction: Combined Microsoft-Yahoo share will be less than 20 percent within 12 months of the deal's closing -- and that's my being somewhat generous so that I don't get totally flamed in comments.

Microsoft already is reaping benefits from its newfound search share. During fiscal 2010 third quarter, online advertising revenue rose 19 percent, or by $81 million, to $502 million. The company attributed most of the advertising sales increases to search share gains.

April 2009 Search Share



Increasing search cannibalization creates quandaries for both Microsoft and Yahoo. Microsoft is in process of logistically assuming responsibility for Yahoo search, with end of calendar year the target for US completion. But at the rate Yahoo is bleeding search share to its partner, will Microsoft end up paying too much to integrate with Yahoo search and for TAC (traffic acquisition costs)? Then there is Yahoo's responsibility for premium search advertising for both services to consider.

Then there is the larger question of whether Microsoft should have cut a deal with Yahoo at all. Perhaps the money would have been better spent improving Bing and buying more advertising. After all, Microsoft has made remarkable gains organically.

More number crunching is warranted. This post is late-day posting. I want to go through the numbers fresh and also ask for analyst comments about the overall value or cost to either Microsoft or Yahoo.

Browser wars heating up again

Browser wars heating up again - Posted By SYD BOLTON

Just when I'd gotten comfortable cruising around with Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8, I received a notice indicating that version 9 is ready for a test drive preview and I can go get it at http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Default.html(and apparently you can too, because nobody told me I couldn't share this with you).

The reason I probably was just starting to feel comfortable with IE8 is because I hardly use it. Unfortunately, there are still some things I must use IE for at work (we have implemented numerous Microsoft technologies that rely on specific features found only in Internet Explorer) but for my day-to-day browsing I find that I'm using Google's Chrome more and more.

Chrome ( http://www.google.com/chrome)has been steadily gaining market share according to w3schools.comwith February of this year showing 11.6% penetration in the market. Safari (from Apple) seems to be holding its own in the last three months at 3.8% and Opera -the renegade browser -dropped slightly to 2.1%.

When you look at the combined statistics from Internet Explorer versions 6, 7, and 8, you get approximately 35.3% market share and Firefox sits at 46.5%. How can this be?

I thought that IE still dominates the planet? It does. The problem with statistics is that you have to be careful of their source. It turns out this is the statistics from the W3 School, which tends to have a lot of developers. This makes sense now. Developers and computer people are more apt to use something such as Firefox, and less likely to use IE.

Why? Is there something that developers know that the general public doesn't? Of course there is. Most developers and IT professionals will tell you Firefox is a safer, better platform to use than IE. Yet users tend to just use what is included with their computer. If a mechanic told you that there was a better oil to use for your car, wouldn't you follow that advice? Sadly, most don't.

If you look at Statcounter's statistics (they provide statistics and logging for a wide variety of websites, including most of mine) they do show a general decline in use of Internet Explorer but it's still at around 54.5%. I find this number more realistic. It shows Firefox on a pretty even trend sitting at 31.28% and Chrome on the increase with 7.19%.

If you haven't tried out a new browser in a while, I'd encourage you to give Chrome a whirl. It's familiar and yet fast and powerful and has a feature that many people try to use without realizing it doesn't work in other browsers. Instead of having separate "search" boxes and "URL" boxes (where you put actual web addresses) Chrome decides it will figure out when you are asking for a specific web address versus when you are wanting to do a keyword search. This is a very handy feature and I thought it might

slow things down a bit but it seems to work quickly and well for me.

Overall, what is great about Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Opera and the rest of the "other" browsers is that they all foster competition for each other. Even though most are free they push each other to improve performance, while adding features and making the overall experience a more positive one for the user.

We also often forget that there are browsers out there for very specific tasks. For example, WebbIE is designed for blind and visually impaired people. Instead of relying on the operating system to make other browsers easier to use, this one is designed to be accessible from the very beginning. You can download it and find out more at http://www.webbie.org.uk.

So try a new browser and send me your thoughts on how it goes. I'm curious to know your experiences.

I'm looking forward to the next generation. Our window into the world of the Internet just a little bigger.

Syd Bolton is the curator of the Personal Computer Museum ( http://www.pcmuseum.ca)and the manager of information technology at ACIC / Methapharm. You can reach him via e-mail at sbolton@bfree. on.caor by

snail mail care of The Expositor, 53
Dalhousie St., Brantford, N3T 5S8.

IE9 Becomes Contender in the Fight for Performance

IE9 Finally Becomes a Contender in the Fight for Performance Supremacy

By Scott M. Fulton, III,Betanews,03/27/10 5:00 AM PT

There are a lot of ways to test a Web browser, and also a lot of ways to compare the results. How important the score in a given area is depends on what kind of Web work the user wants to do. The test preview of IE9 that Microsoft has given to developers scored 8.75 on the scalability scale, meaning its Chakra JavaScript engine performs nearly 9 times better than IE7 when it comes to scaling heavy workloads.

How long ago would you have thought it absolutely impossible for the slowest Windows Web browser currently under development to be coming ... from Mozilla? Granted, the Internet Explorer 9 Tech Preview isn't a real browser (typically, these things need their own address bars and Back buttons). But unless Mozilla gets its JaegerMonkeys in a row in time for Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) to debut IE9 with real features like buttons, the number two reason users cite for switching from Internet Explorer ... will be wiped off the map.

In the most sophisticated system Manage and monitor your systems with Landscape for Ubuntu. Free 60 day Trial. of browser tests ever developed -- reconstructed by Betanews in anticipation of the IE9 preview last week -- IE9 in Windows 7 registered a comprehensive index score of 13.17, representing over 13 times the performance of IE7 in Vista SP2. By comparison, IE8 in Windows 7 scored a mere 2.20, representing about six times the performance of Microsoft's current production browser. That's down from our preliminary estimate from last week, but still a very commendable performance gain. Typically, when developers add real features to their browser projects, that tends to slow down overall JavaScript performance. But that doesn't mean Microsoft won't continue to compensate as they improve their own new JavaScript engine, code-named "Chakra."

Last week's latest daily preview build of Firefox 3.7 Alpha 4, meanwhile, scored a 10.76, using the same tests on the same machine. The new round of Alpha 4 previews represent Mozilla's fastest browser to date, well ahead of the current Firefox stable browser score of 9.08.


That's not the only headline to emerge from the latest tests: Although it had appeared to be holding back in recent weeks, Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) Chrome 5 team managed to find another gear (what would you call it? Eighth gear? Ninth?). On both our old tests and the new, Chrome snatched back a handful of speed points, to post a total score of 23.32. The latest stable Opera 10.51, released just recently -- including bug fixes to the hurriedly released Opera 10.5 -- scored a 23.17 on our new tests, still a big improvement over the stable version score of 21.85. The stable Chrome 4 scores, by comparison, are behind Opera's at 20.05.
Why a New Test Suite, Again?

As Web "browsers" evolve to become Web applications platforms, and as Web "pages" evolve to become applications, it becomes more and more critical for us to understand the differences between the browsers as though they were machines. Readers have told me recently that it might be unfair to keep comparing IE to Chrome, for instance, because (in their words) folks tend to use IE just to browse pages, whereas they may be using Chrome to run Google Apps. For those readers, continuing to declare Google 20 times greater, or so, than IE is like saying over and over again, a tractor's more powerful than a lawnmower. Sure it is. We get it already. But that's not to say lawnmowers don't have their place.

The average BlackBerry has a far slower processor than the common iPhone. That fact is obvious whenever you zoom in and out of a page (the word "zoom" doesn't really apply to most BlackBerrys). And up to now, the standard browser on a BlackBerry is, in my totally unbiased opinion, terrible. (If you're like me, you've replaced it with Opera Mini.) But that doesn't mean the BlackBerry is useless or even inefficient for what it is capable of doing, when it does it well.

Efficiency, for me, is the capability to find another gear and crank out greater work product when the workload increases. You hear marketing Free Report - Discover the Difference of Email Marketing 2.0! folks misuse the word scalability; to me, it's the capability to get more efficient as work gets tougher. Theoretically, if a processor has to do a job x 100 times, you can expect time consumed to grow to 10x if the workload increases to 1,000. If it becomes 15x instead, that's bad.

Modern Web browsers like Firefox utilize just-in-time (JIT) compilers that look ahead through the batch of upcoming JavaScript instructions, to break down jobs into more efficient, more digestible work units. Theoretically, that means when the workload increases to 1,000, time consumed should be more like 7x or 8x. That's the type of scalability I want, and now expect, to see from a modern browser -- more so from a development build of Internet Explorer now than ever before.

When Opera Software last month told me its developers' opinion of the relative efficiency of one of the tests I had been using in our Relative Performance Index suite, I decided to pursue whether they were right. They were. Months earlier, I had resurrected an old test battery used by magazines in the Netscape days, which spun a single instruction a few thousand times and measured time elapsed. Well, in modern days, when a single instruction does nothing, and a thousand or a million repetitions of that instruction do nothing, just-in-time compilers see that it does nothing and, quite efficiently, "compile" that instruction to ... nothing. So when it takes no time at all to do nothing, I frankly shouldn't be all that amazed.

That's when I became more curious about the way JIT compilers work. If the "digestibility" of a sequence of instructions depends on its sameness, then a more appropriate test of a JIT's efficiency would be to throw different algorithms at it whose relative efficiency sometimes depends on its capability to be differentiated rather than the same, throw varying workloads of the same test at it (100, 1,000, 10,000, 10 million iterations), and see how browsers perform under the stress. Will they scale up to meet new demands? Will they opt for easier breakdowns or faster run time?

That's the inspiration behind the latest battery of tests in the Betanews suite: a way to see not only how fast a browser runs and how fast it can become, but why. Back in the 1980s and '90s when I used to test BASIC compilers, I used some common reiterative algorithms and math tests, and I published the results under my old pseudonym, "D. F. Scott." So in honor of my past life, I've christened this new battery "DFScale," a test of varying speeds and scalability under varying conditions.
The IE7 Baseline

The reason Opera 10.5 went from zero to hero as fast as it did was because of how well its JIT compiler breaks down instructions at greater and greater workloads. The reason Internet Explorer 8 cannot catch a break is because it does not scale workloads as well as IE7. In fact, simply overcoming that problem is why IE9 has come so far.

As with the other tests in our suite, we compare our results against Internet Explorer 7 as a baseline, as a way of extracting the relative speed of the machine from consideration. When something scores a 2.00, for example, that's our way of saying it's double the performance of IE7, and it would be double no matter what machine you tested it on.

Everybody who has used IE7 knows what "the speed of IE7" means, generally speaking. But "the scalability of IE7," or any other browser, is not something you can easily see, so drawing a comparison between it and any other browser might not make immediate sense. So here's a general rundown of what I learned: In solving problems that tend to scale linearly as workload increases linearly, IE7's scalability is surprisingly not bad at all. For example, using the algorithm Microsoft used to fix its widely reported choice screen randomization bug last month (yes, the new "shuffler" is indeed one of the algorithms we decided to use), IE7 starts out by shuffling a 250-unit array at about 125,000 units per second. When we change the array to 250,000 units of unique values, the estimated speed is closer to 195,000 units per second. And that's actually very good.

For mathematical problems that become exponentially more complex as the workload grows linearly, IE7 struggles. There are two ways of expressing an algorithm for finding the first numbers in the Fibonacci sequence: one which is compact and easy on the programmer, and another which is more drawn out but easier on the processor. For the compact version, for the first 20 numbers in the sequence, IE7 runs at about 132 iterations per second. Increase the workload to just 30, and the run time slows to just 1.5 iterations per second. Make it 35, and IE7 hangs interminably.

IE8 is only marginally more scalable overall than IE7, partly because in some instances, it's actually a lot worse. The surprise here is, the simpler and more linear the algorithm, the poorer IE8 is at finding that extra gear when it needs it. For simple reiterative problems such as the Sieve of Eratosthenes and a wonderful discovery dubbed "Euler's Problem #14," IE8 can actually become slower than IE7 over time -- its scalability goes way down, below the 1.0 mark. So if you can picture IE7's scalability as 1.0, IE8's is just 1.31.

By comparison, the IE9 Tech Preview issued last week posted a scalability score of 8.75. That means, by our estimate, the "Chakra" JavaScript engine does a nearly 9 times better job of scaling heavier workloads than IE7. Compare that to a 4.47 scalability score for the daily private build of Firefox Alpha 4, and you see some evidence of Microsoft's claim that managing Windows' background/foreground process timing can be more efficient than using tracing and JIT compilation. (Of course, now that this particular cat is out of the bag, imagine what Mozilla could do with it.)
The New Categorical Breakdown

Relative performance of Web browsers in Windows 7 by category, March 22, 2010.





What our new test suite also enables us to do, that we couldn't do before is give you a single graph (rather than 10) that breaks down the browsers' performance by category. Here, our final score is broken down into three groups: computational speed (33 percent), rendering speed (34 percent), and scalability (33 percent).

Just last week, the Chrome 5 development build was posting speed scores that were lower than those of the stable Chrome 4. The score from last Friday's dev build 356.2 (which we verified by running the whole suite two more times completely on a rebooted system) gained back about 14 points in speed alone. One has to wonder just what it was that Google was holding back.

The latest Opera 10.51 is the fastest rendering Web browser in the field, at 19.62; here Chrome 5's scores actually dive below not only Chrome 4 but Safari. While I was devising these tests, the Chrome 5 dev build at the time was posting scalability scores that were not as good as Chrome 4's. Now they're well ahead at 10.93 versus Chrome 4 at 8.25, and Opera 10.51 at 9.47.

Oh, yeah, Safari! Lost amid all this talk about everyone else is the fact that the new stable Safari from Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) is faster and more scalable, and also that it's a better platform for the daily WebKit development builds. WebKit scores had been suffering, but joined with the latest Safari 4.0.5, they've improved dramatically, now with better rendering scores than either the stable or dev build of Chrome.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the five-way shootout. With Opera and now IE officially in the hunt for supremacy, the Web browser battle may as well follow Joe Bob Briggs' first rule of horror pictures: Anybody can die at any moment.

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