Archive for the ‘browser’ Category

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Is Google’s Chrome Reduced Pagerank a penalty (II)?!

Wednesday, January 4th, 2012

Actually I doubt if there is any real penalty.

Probably Google will advertise more; that will raise the bidding for adds on `browser` keywords. So Microsoft has to pay more for there adds for Internet Explorer 9 on the Google pages. It might benefit Google eventually 😉 .

IMHO the complete bidding system for adds is murky, it’ isn’t exactly transparent, and being able to drive up your own prices doesn’t seem to help much.

A real penalty would include a stop for advertisements.

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Why I use Opera as my main browser

Tuesday, November 8th, 2011

Yeah, I use it since the Phoenix Alpha’s but the main reason is…
(more…)

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The beauty of WebGL

Friday, July 1st, 2011

We have seen some demo’s with fishtanks and aquariums, but I found a much more elegant showcase here. It stresses the beauty of infinity and brings focus to the relationship between simplicity and complexity, often found in nature.

An intriguing animated M.S. Escher drawing.

You can see the working example here:
http://wakaba.c3.cx/w/escher_droste.html

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Browser performance and CPU load

Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

Chromium is using 2 cores and Opera isn’t running full speed on Sunspider JS benchmark. That is the outcome of a simple test running TOP while taking the sunspider benchmark on a quadcore (AMD 630) Ubuntu 64 machine with the three main browsers: Chromium, Firefox and Opera. Opera 11.11 is surprisingly never using more then 80% CPU while Firefox 4 is using 100% and Chromium 12 150%. A quadcore can take 400%, when all 4 CPU cycles are fully utilized. Opera is the slowest performer on the benchmark, no surprise and Firefox is somehow disabling graphical output: nearly no load on X-server, and no visual graphical output, while Opera and in a lesser extent Chromium show a lot of flickering and flashing. Opera is also putting a bigger load on Compiz, the compositing window manager for Linux, AKA 3d eye candy. But Opera, as said before, is also giving more visual feedback about downloading files and stuff with an animated icon in the addressbar.

Sunspider benchmark results

Firefox 4:	Total:		   355.6ms +/- 2.6%
Chromium 12:  Total:		   348.2ms +/- 4.9%
Opera 11.11:  Total:		   413.2ms +/- 3.3%

TOP results

Firefox 4
Tasks: 277 total,   2 running, 273 sleeping,   1 stopped,   1 zombie
Cpu(s): 27.1%us,  3.5%sy,  0.0%ni, 69.0%id,  0.3%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   5093632k total,  5016508k used,	77124k free,   220824k buffers
Swap:  9055228k total,		0k used,  9055228k free,  2074600k cached

PID USER	  PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM	TIME+  COMMAND
7063 user	   20   0  923m 325m  41m R  101  6.5   2:46.61 firefox-bin
2193 root	   20   0  235m 131m  32m S   12  2.6  12:11.16 Xorg
3119 user	   20   0  374m  62m  20m S	8  1.3   5:13.44 compiz

Chromium 12
Tasks: 280 total,   3 running, 273 sleeping,   3 stopped,   1 zombie
Cpu(s): 44.0%us,  9.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 46.3%id,  0.8%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   5093632k total,  4856072k used,   237560k free,   217760k buffers
Swap:  9055228k total,		0k used,  9055228k free,  2011968k cached

PID USER	  PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM	TIME+  COMMAND
7317 user	   20   0  880m  81m  26m R  102  1.6   1:20.46 chromium-browse
2193 root	   20   0  243m 138m  40m S   44  2.8  13:07.53 Xorg
7295 user	   20   0  519m  51m  31m R   41  1.0   0:37.04 chromium-browse
3119 user	   20   0  374m  62m  20m S   11  1.3   5:33.46 compiz

Opera 11.11
Tasks: 280 total,   4 running, 272 sleeping,   3 stopped,   1 zombie
Cpu(s): 23.3%us, 11.3%sy,  0.0%ni, 64.1%id,  1.2%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.2%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   5093632k total,  4849588k used,   244044k free,   217972k buffers
Swap:  9055228k total,		0k used,  9055228k free,  2004908k cached

PID USER	  PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM	TIME+  COMMAND
6051 user	   20   0  863m 428m  29m S   81  8.6  13:51.12 opera
2193 root	   20   0  236m 131m  32m R   47  2.6  13:22.27 Xorg
3119 user	   20   0  374m  62m  20m R   18  1.3   5:38.20 compiz

Conclusion

Seems that Opera isn’t going full throttle on benchmarks. I wonder why that is. Chromium is the only browser that is using multiple cores, but it isn’t actually much faster than Firefox. Another interesting thing is that Chromium feels the snappier browser but actually is stressing your PC more.

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Google Chrome joins Opera in SVG background image support

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

I always liked Opera’s support for SVG, and I really welcomed their initiative to treat SVG as any other image type, like jpg or gif or png. After all SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is a vector-image  mark up language (XML), like Flash or Silverlight but free and it’s an Open Standard.

Round corners, gradients, multi-image background, watermarks, nearly everything (animation?) can be handled by SVG, so it’s quite a powerful feature. Creating a dataURL of SVG is possible, so creating a CSS file with several gradient backgrounds, round borders is indeed a very efficient way of designing webpages. It’s cached, and although the initial css file is a bit heavier, no extra server requests are needed  to load additional images. It’s fast, lean and flexible.

I’m glad to see Google Chrome as the first other main browser join Opera in support for SVG images as backgrounds in CSS declarations.

SVG support as background image in Google Chrome

SVG support as background image in Google Chrome

Chrome’s implementation isn’t without errors, see what happens if you start scrolling the webpage in the brand new Chrome for Linux beta, but is a start. I hope Mozilla/Firefox and Apple/Webkit will follow soon.

Google Chrome rendering issues SVG background

Google Chrome rendering issues SVG background

I’ve given up expectations for Microsoft Explorer, see my other post. To be short: they wanna sell their Silverlight.

I’m not without any hope, :), I hope Internet Explorer users will start using other webstandard compliant browsers and consequently MS marketshare will drop significantly. Only then they probably will convert to an attitude of supporting and promoting open standards.

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What about Microsoft Internet Explorer 6?

Friday, December 4th, 2009

Use it at your own risk!

Consider yourself lucky if it serves any accessible and well-formatted content on the web and always be aware you could miss something: you can’t expect seeing colors on a black and white TV.

Internet Explorer 7 is a bit better, and 8 is a bit better again, although it’s compatibility setting is a big lie. Designers don’t design websites for browsers, they program following rules and  according to international webstandards. Unfortunately sometimes (=always in case of Internet Explorer)) you have to patch a site to work well in browsers. Historically Internet Explorer doesn’t comply to those web-standards.

IMHO the costs of website-design is raised by approximately 50% due to weak standards support by Internet Explorer. I guess that worldwide loss is bigger than the cost of the financial crises in autumn 2009. Billions of euros.

Compare it with an added translation in Microsofts gibberish of several pages to every plain English written book, magazine or newspaper. Nobody wants that, but on the web it’s a fact.

Microsoft is selling an Operating System, they don’t like advanced web-applications: it makes their core business obsolete. So they try to slowdown innovation. And they try to push proprietary standards as Video-encoding techniques and Silverlight: we can use it only if we pay Microsoft and buy their software.

You wonder why sensible people are using Explorer at all. Probably they’re ignorant. It’s simply pre-installed. The same reason the crisis hit that hard: My bank offered me a mortgage, I thought I could trust my bank. Well, they make money and we pay the bill.