For its upcoming Firefox 4.0 release, Mozilla has been concentrating a great deal on what is often cited as the main shortcoming of Firefox ... its speed. For example, Firefox 4.0 will include GPU acceleration for both rendering and compositing on Windows 7/Vista, OSX and Linux, and it will have GPU acceleration for compositing only for Windows XP.
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Member since:2005-09-08
KHTML uses the same drivers and X11 interface. So XRender does not explain the at least factor 10 difference. XRender would explain it if performance with Qt's software raster was consistantly faster than using Qt's X11 raster. When the difference only happens for the Webkit engine and not KHTML, it is my assumption they are doing ineffienct things, probably rendering to server-side pixmaps, and then processing those pixmaps client-side. That would explain why the very same painting routine is much faster when done entirely client side.
Member since:2006-01-02
It not at all that clear. There are sufficiently many equally valid, different ways of rendering the same thing, that just because you found firefox slower than konqueror on a particular demo doesn't have to mean it does stupid things: it can also just be that it uses different functions, hits different bugs and performance issues in the graphics system.
Of course it _can_ also be that it's doing something stupid with XRender, but keep in mind that on other demos, with the right XRender driver (e.g. NVIDIA proprietary driver works well here) it's doing great, for example on this benchmark:
http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/PsychedelicBrowsing/
(I get 1400-1500 score!) So not all of what we do can be that stupid.
Of course XRender is not a long-term solution anyway. The only satisfactory solution is to implement a free equivalent of Direct2D, i.e. hardware-accelerated content drawing, using of course OpenGL. This is a really hard job: it will require lots of 2d graphics work, and lots of GL performance knowledge.
There are some efforts in that direction already but none is satisfactory as of yet. The Cairo/OpenGL backend is far from ready last I heard. The Qt/OpenGL backend has poor performance (what I meant above when I said it would require lots of thinking GL-performance-wise). I heard that Qt is moving to a higher-level scene-graph approach, which will be great for lots of applications, but there's little hope that it will be enough to use for a web engine, where one needs to implement a very wide variety of primitives and where 1 pixel errors can't be tolerated.
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it."I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)"."The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane.
"MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: "Well, I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight.""And so it is with Dell's Alienware X51 R2, a small form factor gaming PC in console digs. It's shaped similar to Microsoft's Xbox 360 Slim, and though it's slightly larger than either a 360 or PlayStation 3, the X51 R2 would be right at home in a living room setting nestled next to a large screen TV. Indeed, it's adept at running Steam's Big Picture mode, and if your primary objective is to play games in the living room, go ahead and consider the X51 R2 a hybrid game console." This is obviously not the only machine like this - still, these are very valid console alternatives even for those that don't like being hunched over with a cramped WASD-claw. Also, PC gamers among us: could you get away with the $699 model for gaming?
From Bloomberg: "Microsoft, the world's largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes." The lid has officially been blown off.
Member since:
2006-01-02
Apparently you did these measurements on linux.
we know about that problem. I guess we should blacklist certain drivers for XRender. You can file a bug with enough system info (X, graphics driver, etc), it'd be a starting point in that direction.
it's just that so far, coding a xrender-crappy-driver-blacklist-on-*nix hasn't been the biggest priority. That can change if the ever evolving web makes it a showstopper for many *nix users.
So the most probable thing that happened is that you are using XRender for content acceleration (the only option currently on linux, since Direct2D is windows-specific) and no accelerated composition (since GL is disabled by default, set layers.accelerate-all to true in about:config to enable it).
So what you're measuring here is that your XRender drivers are crappy. Big news
Next time, please just avoid jumping to the conclusion that we're retarded