Release The Kraken(blog.mozilla.com) |
Release The Kraken(blog.mozilla.com) |
Minefield 4 b6 9737.7ms
Opera 10.62 14490.8ms
Chrome 7.0.517.5 dev 18375.4ms
Firefox 4 Beta 5 21721.1ms
Safari 5.0 22168.6ms
Firefox 3.6.9 30053.3ms
Explorer 9 PP4 64817.2ms
What's probably more interesting is the order of other browsers (for which this benchmark should be less tuned) - again Opera performed very well (and better than Chrome).
Safari 5 13939.9ms +/- 1.6%
Chrome 6.0.472.55 19155.2ms +/- 1.3%
Firefox 3.6.4 23567.1ms +/- 2.8% Safari 5 11018.2ms +/- 0.3%
Chrome 6.0.472.55 15342.7ms +/- 1.0%
Firefox 3.6.8 18917.6ms +/- 0.1%
(Note that I'm not saying this is unfair or biased at all. This is a good set of benchmarks to have.)
I am regularly amused by the stream of inane blog posts from "UX Professionals" declaring bankruptcy because oh god they have 22 tabs open — and then they go on to propose some ridiculous unbuilt UI that's even less capable, but makes them feel designery.
Chrome does start to bog down eventually, and I can respond to that by killing off worker processes, which leaves the swath of tabs it was responsible for dead, but still in place with their URL and I can just hit refresh. With Firefox the whole browser will repeatedly lock up for seconds at a time at a much lower usage threshold and eventually crash completely, taking 5 minutes out of my day. Before I switched to Chrome, I would have Firefox would crash at least 10 times per week. That and their regular releases baking AwesomeBullshit into Firefox instead of releasing extensions was more than enough to compel me to ditch it.
Results for firefox 4 beta7:
http://krakenbenchmark.mozilla.com/kraken-1.0/results.html?%...
Results for chrome 7.0.517.0 dev:
http://krakenbenchmark.mozilla.com/kraken-1.0/results.html?%...
(Win7, AMD Athlon XP2400 2.0GHz)
Chrome 6.0.472.55 beta: 46946.5ms
Opera 10.62: 234444.6ms
IE9: 71864.8msEDIT: Click to the results page and explanation links: http://bit.ly/cXTBUb (using a redirect because HN broke when I used the real URI)
Here's the list:
ai: 922.9ms +/- 3.2%
astar: 922.9ms +/- 3.2%
audio: 5564.5ms +/- 3.4%
beat-detection: 1996.1ms +/- 5.2%
dft: 821.8ms +/- 6.8%
fft: 1965.6ms +/- 6.0%
oscillator: 781.0ms +/- 0.9%
imaging: 2875.9ms +/- 1.4%
gaussian-blur: 1271.2ms +/- 1.1%
darkroom: 510.1ms +/- 0.7%
desaturate: 1094.6ms +/- 4.0%
json: 365.9ms +/- 1.6%
parse-financial: 235.5ms +/- 1.6%
stringify-tinderbox: 130.4ms +/- 2.1%
stanford: 2392.1ms +/- 3.2%
crypto-aes: 468.7ms +/- 2.0%
crypto-ccm: 656.2ms +/- 3.5%
crypto-pbkdf2: 1063.0ms +/- 4.5%
crypto-sha256-iterative: 204.2ms +/- 2.9%http://krakenbenchmark.mozilla.com/kraken-1.0/results.html?%...
Of course it performs much worse on this benchmark than other browsers on my old hardware, but I haven't noticed any problems while browsing.
I shall attempt to document what I am presently filling all those tabs with:
* Personal Gmail and Google Reader, along with a dozen or so links opened from them
* Several work-related OWA mailboxes and Google Apps mail and docs accounts
* 10 Hacker News discussions, including the one I'm making this comment in.
Normally there would be two for this discussion as I open the 'reply' link
in a new tab to not lose my place, but this tab was from a Notifo growl
* A couple dozen tabs are for music, TV, games, and films to investigate/pirate
* A dozen profiles of people to get in contact with on social networking sites
* Another dozen active threads on several phpBB forums I am a member of
* Several dozen tabs of product pages from manufacturers, alibaba, and ecommerce
sites for several physical projects I'm working on.
* A dozen tabs of research for software projects I'm working on
Of the tabs presently open, about half are new in the last 24 hours. Chrome's chrome://history/ page only lets me page back through 450 items chronologically, which is about a third of my average daily usage.
I've tried a number of tools to collect links in — bookmarks, social bookmarks, Google Docs, Google Wave, etc., but I always end up falling back to tabs because I'm already using them anyway! I'm currently giving the Chrome/GDocs bookmark syncing a shot for things that are 'out of mind'.
Then, I have a Firefox window open for every subtask[1], which for example, could be a window full of documentation tabs, a window full of more documentation tabs for a different thing, and then a window full of even more documentation tabs for a third thing, all next to Eclipse, with a few vims open too for stuff I dont want open in Eclipse.
[1] I've actually started consolidating sub-task windows into tab groups inside Panorama/Eyecandy so its just one window per task. Control-space to bring up the local tab groups is very nifty.
Flash video playback does stutter regularly on my ridiculously overpowered machine. Occasionally a group of tabs will pause from an obviously flash-related issue (the flash open file dialog has been causing me grief), but it recovers in a couple seconds. Once a month or so I have to kill the flash plugin process because it goes on a runaway malloc train, but it doesn't affect my tabsplosion at all — I just have to refresh a couple of them when having flash loaded again would serve some useful purpose.
A lot of the icky problems with having a lot of tabs went away soley due to that (at least, for those without habitual flashblock usage).
The Google Bookmark sync actually works pretty well between all of them for things that aren't transient. I just realized that there's probably a decent 'bookmarks sidebar' extension out there, and combined with "Open All Bookmarks in New Window" that could alleviate a lot of my project-related tabcruft.
I have indeed "lost all that state" many times over the years, but it hasn't happened since I switched to Chrome (It did corrupt its session once, but it keeps a backup). It happened every couple months with Firefox on Linux, though I couldn't dig as big of a hole since it crashed more than once per day on average.
Years ago when I used Safari as my main browser it didn't have session saving yet, I used a SIMBL extension that continuously saved all state (including the full DOM with no redownloading), but ironically caused it to crash much more frequently. In those days I would rotate between Safari, Camino, and Shiira using two at a time, so that when the primary started to fall over I could start a fresh session and let the tabs dwindle in the old ones until they could be quit.
Firefox 3.5.x is slower than hell on it, and I last time I tried, Chromium wouldn't build on PowerPC.
Having two heads on seperate machines comes in rather handy for managing workflow of concurrent complex tasks; as in, I can yell at someone on one while doing work on the other.
I use synergy to "transport" input to the laptop.