Guest post by Haiku’s new web browser, WebPositive, has seen a new update. This new release benefits from updates in app_server and enables better text and canvas rendering. The new WebKit-based browser also has new support for bookmarks and additional usability improvements. Find out more at the developer’s blog.
I’m continually amazed at Stippi’s progress. For the Flying Images test on my system, Chromium under Linux gets just a few (3-4) frames per second. Firefox 3 gets 30-40, and Web+ gets almost 50! He sure is making a lot of fast progress on development, too! Way to go!
Christian Packman is to credit for the fast scaled bitmap rendering. He wrote assembly code versions of the scaling routines I wrote. The Chrome rendering has excellent down-scaling. The Haiku app_server downscaling only looks good above a factor of 0.5. But I don’t believe proper downscaling is the main reason for Chrome’s slowness. Firefox on Windows should also be faster, but Chrome on Windows appears as slow as the Linux version. But the WebKit guys are already working on hardware accelerated compositing from what I understand of the codebase so they should soon catch up to IE9 in rendering speed. And of course Chrome is much faster in other respects — network caching, faster Javascript and multi-threading contribute to an overall much snappier experience. Eventually, we should be able to have all that enabled in WebPositive as well.
I don’t know what you mean by “Chrome”, but the Google Chrome browser I and other thousands of users in the world use, is the fastest browser in the world in either windows or linux.
Not only that I and thousands of users say so, but many tests and benchmarks say so, too.
I believe this is the test which is being referenced here:
http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/01FlyingImages/Defaul…
This test runs fast/smooth on IE9 and Firefox while running like complete dogshit on Chrome currently.
It was obviously put together by Microsoft to demonstrate something that not all browsers are good at and would benefit from video acceleration in the browser.
Odd that it runs slow on Chrome (you said you use IE9, so I’m assuming that you use windows). It runs very well on Safari 4 on old MacBook with OSX 10.6 and a crap Intel integrated GMA950 graphics, I get around 60 FPS.
Its odd because Safari and Chrome both use Webkit as the rendering engine. Safari uses CoreGraphics (OSX equivalent to DirectDraw on Windows) on OSX to do the display, but Chrome might use Windows GDI, not sure, never looked at the source code for the windows flavor of Chrome.
Strange that Konqueror runs faster this test with KHTML (15-20fps) than with WebKit (2-3fps).
Yes, I did mean Google Chrome. And did you even read what I wrote? I mean all of it? I am asking because your reply is so much besides the point.
I’m sorry to disappoint you, but browsers aren’t 3d games, so frame rate actually means nothing.
It matters more if the implementation is more bug free, the speed of html rendering, the speed of the javascript interpretor and standard compliance.
It seems Haiku is on a good track to usability as a main OS these days. I’m very excited to see the full rebirth of my favorite classic OS! I may even save up for a netbook so I can start playing with it during downtime at work; I still don’t like running it in a VM.
As always, keep up the great work guys!!