Every so often, it’s nice to take a look at the state of Javascript performance among the various browsers. Though misleading, it’s become something of a truism that “browser performance” is just a nice euphemism for “Javascript performance,” since any website doing anything interesting is basically leveraging Javascript to do it. What’s come up since [...]
It’s been close to two years since I wrote GNOME Audio Player Shootout, a visual and textual comparison of some the best available audio players for the GNOME desktop. As is usually the case in the world of free software, a lot has happened since then (and yet, in a strange way, things have stayed [...]
I personally think the friendly rivalry between the open-source Webkit engine (which powers Safari, among other things) and Mozilla (the Gecko engine, actually) is one of the best things to happen to browser development in years. The constant one-upsmanship can only lead to better browsers. Well, Internet Explorer will constantly be the limiting factor, but [...]
About 2 years ago I wrote a piece called Five things that Desktop Linux really needs, attempting to air out my five biggest grievances with Desktop Linux. If you follow FOSS news, every year is heralded as “The Year of the Linux Desktop,” although such a thing clearly hasn’t happened yet. Now, two years later, [...]
I recently performed some cursory Javascript benchmarks with the new version of Firefox and Safari; curious about performance, I decided to do some testing of 32-bit browsers against their 64-bit counterparts. On Windows Vista x64, the only two browsers so available to me are Internet Explorer 7 and a recent nightly build of Firefox 3. [...]
Continuing the tradition of my previous post about Safari, I thought I would revisit Firefox’s performance on the SunSpider benchmark. Clearly, Firefox has also made drastic strides in its Javascript engine, which is an entirely new piece donated by Adobe (and is the same engine, or so I understand, which powers the Actionscript interpreter of [...]