Aa Ideas

A follow-up of this.

Note: I am just comparing Javascript. This is no longer a good way to benchmark a whole browser, if it ever was… but it is just interesting to me, and gives one metric that is an important one.

Environment is Ubuntu 10.10 64bit on Core2Quad@2.66Ghz

All the browsers have advanced pretty well. Once Firefox 4 finally ships I’d say the playing field is pretty level for javascript performance in browsers on Linux. In real world usage I just don’t know that anyone would be able to distinguish a speed difference between the browsers when it comes to javascript. The next pieces browsers need to keep working on are HTML5 and CSS3 implementations, Hardware acceleration for 2D and 3D rendering, and additional browser features, like extensibility and ‘installable’ web apps.

As a web developer I am excited about where things are going, and how the web as a platform is advancing. Native (meaning native to the OS/Desktop environment) applications aren’t gone yet, and probably won’t be for a long time yet, but they are needing a better and better excuse to not move into the browser. What would be the benefit of that you ask? The same that Java Swing, Adobe AIR and others have tried to achieve. OS independence. You write it for Firefox according to defined standards and it should work on all browsers that implement the same standards on all the OS’s. That is a big deal! I think a couple prime candidates for proof of concept browser apps would be all the little games normally included in Ubuntu. Mines, Solitaire, Tetris clones etc. and maybe the social networking client like Gwibber. If only I had more time to play…

Update: I played some with Tetris in a browser idea

If you want to test a flexible or elastic site layout in Ubuntu you will be doing some window resizing. In MS Windows and Mac OSX window contents dynamically resize. It is a feature that makes it nice for seeing how CSS floats and positioning are behaving. I don’t know if it is a consequence of Compiz or what, but Ubuntu doesn’t do this be default. It only redraws the contents one you are finished resizing. Dynamic resizing is something you can enable in Ubuntu, though it is certainly not an area where Ubuntu shines.

To enable you will have to open CompizConfig Settings Manager (install it first if you don’t have it, obviously), open the “Resize Window” settings go to the “General” tab and from the “default  resize mode” drop down choose ‘normal’

You should now see window contents redrawn during the resize process, but chances are it is really laggy and crappy. To avoid the majority of this annoying crappiness on the rest of your desktop you can reset the default resize mode to rectangle or outline, and on the line that says “Normal Resize Windows” click the “+” icon. In the dialog that appears use the “grab” feature to pick the browser you want to have dynamic resizing on then click “add” to finish. That’s it! Close the settings Manager and you should be set.

UPDATE: A little more research turned up that this was in fact more an issue with Compiz. So I installed Compiz Fusion Icon , started that up and selected Metacity as the window manager. Dynamic resizing works in all the windows I tested and pretty fast/smooth. The downside is all my Compiz effects are gone, but it’s relatively easy to flip back and forth between Metacity and Compiz, so this is probably a better solution to this issue. I also noticed my javascript animations got much smoother with Compiz off.

Really if the only significant piece of compiz animation I would actually miss is the desktop switcher and zoom functionality.

Also, just tried it and this Metacity fix all goes away if you turn on Metacity’s compositioning feature as well. Compositioning is the problem, so it seems…

Yeah, i know not another “year of Linux” prediction. So lame, but eh, whats the harm really

I have been thinking for a while now that Android is really the up and coming platform. This article about the android market reaching the 20,000 app milestone seems to agree, but is pretty conservative about it. Things it doesn’t consider is that the Android Market is just one place that apps are released. Apps can be made available other ways, such as a simple download available on the web that you then drop onto your device, or accessed directly through specific URL’s.

Also in contrast to native apps there are web apps. Web-apps developed for iPhone’s mobile safari browser also run on other mobile webkit browsers like the one found on Android (and Palm’s WebOS) and vice-versa. There is no count on those that I know of, but they are definitely growing in numbers and I suspect their popularity will be increasing dramatically. Less platform lock in is a big draw for developers. Additionally, existing tools make developing mobile apps relatively easy. For example, Android benefits from already existing tools like JqTouch, xUI, iUI and others

Then there is the fact that Android is starting to show up on things other than phones, like e-readers,  tablets, and amazing looking reader-tablet hybrids

With 2010 just around the corner some people are sure to claim (yet again) that this will be the year for Linux to break out, and they might be right as 2010 is really shaping up to be a big year for Android.

If you don’t already have Ubuntu Tweak I recommend it. From there you can enable the development repos for Firefox development versions. Under Applications>Third-Party Sources. Otherwise you can do it strait from launchpad.

If you run the update manager Firefox 3.5.6pre will be installed, and Under Synaptic Firefox 3.6b3 and 3.7a1 will be available to install. I only tried installing 3.6. It wont overwrite your current install of FF, and I noticed I could even run two versions at the same time. In the applications menu “Firefox” will be replaced with Shiretoko (the code name for the 3.5 release) and Namoroka (the code name for 3.6) will now show up.

There are other more complete browser benchmarks out there, but I just wanted a quick rundown of how much of a performance improvement is coming with 3.6.

Browser Benchmarks

Ubuntu 9.10 – Nov 12th 2009 – Sunspider:

Epiphany 2.28 [w/WebKit] (64bit) – 580.2ms
Chromium 4.0.245.0 (64bit) – 583.2ms
Chromium 4.0.245.0 (on slower 32 bit system) – 616.2ms
Epiphany 2.28 [w/WebKit] (on slower 32 bit system) -  954.8ms
Firefox 3.6b3pre (on slower 32 bit system) – 1385.4ms
FF 3.5.5 (on slower 32 bit system) – 1642.8ms
Firefox 3.5.6pre (on slower 32 bit system) – 1677.0ms
Firefox 3.6b3pre (64bit) – 2084.2ms
Firefox 3.5.6pre (64bit) – 2755.8ms
Opera 10.01 (64bit) – 3701.4ms
Opera 10.01 (on slower 32 bit system) – 6089.0ms (yikes!)

For whatever reason FF does poorly on the sunspider test on my 64 bit machine. I switched this machine to 64 bit when I did a fresh install of Karmic. I have run previous tests on in it as 32bit and FF did better then. see old post. Surprisingly Epiphany won the race overall.

That inspired me to play with Epiphany just a bit and found out it can be customized to be a pretty slick browser! I found it has an inspector for web developers, automatically opens source (ctrl+U) in gedit, and in many way behaves very much like chrome. It opens fast, plays flash well, and the chrome can be stripped down so it wastes less screen space. For example if you turn off the status bar link URL’s show up in the bottom left corner just like in Chrome, a nice little touch. The unified address/search bar also serves as a progress bar like Safari used to/does(?). here’s a screenshot:

Epiphany and web inspector looking good

Big news in the web-development world. Could Chrome Frame be the death knoll of IE6?

The primary company I work for has an old style Java app that was designed specifically for IE6. It has since been opened up to Firefox as well, but other browsers are still locked out. In one sense I am excited about Chrome Frame because it might mean we get to drop official support for IE6 sooner. In another sense I feel like Google might be playing a dirty underhanded trick to force sites that support IE to also support Chrome.

The scenario I envision goes like this: A unsuspecting and not-so-tech-savvy person is prompted on some site far far away to install the Chrome Frame plugin for IE. Seems innocent enough, so they do, and it works! all is well. Then at some point not so long after that they sign in to our application with no problem. Our browser sniffer doesn’t see anything amiss, just another IE user. Then potentially things start not working like they are used to. (i don’t know if this would happen, we don’t test Chrome/webkit since we don’t support it…). they get stuck enough or frustrated enough that they call our support staff for help, and after some time spent trying to understand what is happening we have to say either, “sorry, we don’t support IE with plugins like that,” or, “sorry, that is a bug and we need to fix it.” Both options make us look bad to paying customers.

Google’s motivations supposedly include making life easy for developers, and I think for the most part Chrome Frame will achieve that. It is just one more reason that I won’t bother to test/support old IE browsers a number of sites I work on. However, I think the whole, “we want to help developers”, and, “we want to advance the web” is more marketing spin. Not to say it’s untrue that they want those things too, but Google is a company and companies usually have less altruistic motives.

Because of Google Frame companies like the one I work for are now forced to consider if we will support Chrome. That means for companies who have sites that were built specifically for IE, life just got harder. Ultimately supporting Chrome would be a good thing since it would basically mean a much more standards compliant site – something that is definitely one of the companies goals. The answer to the question, ‘should we support Chrome?’ should be yes, It already was in fact, but before it was less of a priority. The benefit that Google gets for pushing this shift of priorities is that the one more hurdle to Chrome gaining browser share is dismantled. Greater market share in their browser arena means a more prominent platform for their services, and that affects the bottom line. This perspective makes Google seem less likable to me. On the other hand, Google really is advancing web standards which opens the doors that much wider to any other standards compliant browsers, and I do like that…

been a while since I did this sort of thing. I was curious how things were coming along with Firefox 3.6 alpha (the one that shows up as ‘unknown’ in the graph), and the latest Opera release candidate. I wonder if it would slow Chromium down if I enabled the flash plugin… I think a few extra plugins for firefox 3.5.2 might be what is slowing it down compared to 3.5.0, but I don’t really want to go through the trouble of turning them off and on again.

Here are my results for the Sunspider benchmark:

• FF3.6a – 1758.4ms
• FF 3.5.2 – 1849.6ms
• Opera10RC – 5361.2ms
• Chromium4 – 726.6ms

and for the Peacekeeper benchmark:

IE6 (Internet Explorer 6)  is dying and with every month that goes by I give less and less effort to supporting it, but IE7 is still relatively popular. I have been relying on other machines to test IE7 but that gets kinda old. Running Windows in virtual environment or dualbooting have been other ways I have tried to solve the problem of testing Microsoft’s troublesome browsers. Today I managed to figure out a relatively simple way of getting IE7 running with Wine on Ubuntu 9.04.

The first step is to go to the Wine download page which will walk you through installing the latest Wine.  For me it was 1.1.26.

You will also want to get winetricks.

Here is where it gets just a little technical. I tried a couple different methods and this is way I finally got things to work.

1. From a terminal, navigate to where you downloaded the winetricks file and type “sh winetricks”.
2. In the window that appears check the box for “ie6″ and click OK.
3. Follow the prompts for the IE6 installer.
4. Test IE6 by opening Applications->Wine->Browse C:/ Drive … Program Files->Internet Explorer — right click on “IEXPLORE.EXE” and select “open with ‘Wine…’” .

Getting IE6 running is just a preliminary step that I found to be necessary in order to get to IE7. If you wanted to stop here you could. If you are on a 32bit version of Juanty you can go farther and get IE7 running – I wasn’t able to get it running on 64bit systems:

1. download IE7.
2. Close any running IE windows.
3. Right click on the .exe and select “open with ‘Wine…’”
4. Follow the prompts as per a normal windows install except that you should uncheck the updates option
5. start IE7 the same way you previously started IE6

Screenshot here…

Have fun!!!

I must say Google Chrome touched on some great stuff with their UI design. Firefox 3.5 will still be my primary browser, but more and more I use Chromium. It is fast, light, and just a pleasure to use.

I did find a way to improve the Firefox 3.5 UI and make it a little more Chrome like by using the Tiny Menu Plugin and customizing the toolbars. This makes it more friendly for smaller laptop or netbook screens, but I like it even on a large monitor.

Here are some instructions to get the toolbars set up this way:

1. Install the Tiny Menu Plugin and restart Firefox.
2. Go into the view menu option and under toolbars select “customize…”
3. Drag pieces from navigation toolbar onto the menu toolbar – arrange to taste…
4. Optionally replace “home” button with “bookmarks” button ( I find I almost never use the home button. )
5. Go back into menu>view>toolbars and un-check the navigation and bookmarks toolbar options

First Try

My first try at it was pretty good, but I played around just a bit and replaced “menu” with an icon and arranged icons a little more to my taste

second try