A new speed milestone for Chrome
blog.chromium.org
blog.chromium.org
Let's say I am visiting a properly made website and it takes 10% of CPU to render. Even if browser devs make their browser twice faster, it will only save 5% of CPU time - and that would be completely unnoticeable. You might ask, what about modern websites, built with D*t compiled to webassembly, GPU acceleration, reactive frameworks, material design and capable to load the multi-core CPU at 100%? I am not using such sites so I don't care.
Now let's look at memory usage. Optimizing for speed usually causes increased memory consumption, and this increases the chance of invoking swapping. If the system starts swapping, it becomes orders of magnitude slower. No speed optimizations will matter in this case.
Therefore if you are targeting wide audience, and not only mac users, then you should be optimizing for memory usage. If the browser could use two times less memory while using twice amount of CPU time that would be perfect. Just think how many laptops with 2 or 4 Gb of RAM would become usable again.
And given a choice between being able to open several tabs all of which are barely functional and being stuck on a single website at at time which runs smoothly I'd definitely choose the later (of course the tradeoff is probably not as straightforward, then again it's not completely obvious to me that optimizing for speed would necessarily result in higher memory consumption).
IMO even if they are optimizing for Macs, I'm not sure this approach would make sense (assuming the tradeoff between CPU performance and RAM usage exists) since they are much more likely to have less memory and better CPUs than PC laptops (e.g. you can probably easily get a Windows laptops with 32GB for $1000 or less).
Do you have any graphs/charts/tables to substantiate the claim that high memory usage is power hungry enough to be optimized for vs CPU?
It is like when people say page fragmentation in SQL Server isn't important any more because random access is so fast due to SSDs and other IO subsystem improvements – pages are held in RAM in the storage format so if they are only ⅔ filled you are wasting ⅓ of the allocated memory which can have significant performance effects if your common working set is not smaller than the memory available. Though in fairness, I would agree that this issue is usually quite far down the list of things that need addressing in poorly performing database & applications.
Perhaps you meant storing and fetching from memory lots impacts battery life?
Lol, no?
If your benchmark is memory bound, reducing memory usage is probably the simplest way to make it faster.
Does this just mean that browser developers are optimizing for the right thing, just not something that benefits you? Tons of people use these sites.
> If the system starts swapping, it becomes orders of magnitude slower.
Not really. Browsers try to keep stuff in swap that they probably won't need. Swapping doesn't become a problem until you're almost out of memory as well, and then you might get thrashing. But there's a wide range where CPU optimizations make sense. And such a large fraction of people have SSDs that even swap access can be pretty fast.
The former lasts over 2 weeks in S3, the latter not even a week.
Plus, most laptop manufacturers rip you off for every RAM spec bump. $400 - $500 to go from 16GB to 32GB?! They can f--k right off!
Not everyone is making six figure SV salaries to not flinch at these prices. That's why I love the framework laptop.
That'd be 90-150€ for upgrading average Thinkpad for me, depending on starting configuration.
Of course, having turned browsers into virtual machines, there isn't much specialisation that can be done without breaking things. Might it be time to create a subset of features that sites could limit themselves to and allow browsers to use a simpler and faster render pipeline? You know, like what we thought AMP was going to be before it turned out to have Google's monopolistic shit smeared all over it.
Of course, having turned browsers into virtual machines
> You might ask, what about modern websites [...] I am not using such sites so I don't care.
They might be optimizing the wrong thing for you, but the majority do use "modern sites"
As much as I want them to optimise for memory usage. Taking less CPU time for rendering is extremely important for battery.
Not to mention faster site is noticeable. And that is what sells. Chrome was faster than everything else when it launched. ( May be apart from Opera )
In reality it is complicated when we have extra CPU cycle to burn developers tends to put fancy new things. Which is basically what andy giveth bill taketh away.
Java for example uses runtime VM information before it starts compiling classes to machine code. That means it's faster in the long run, but requires a 'warm up time'. Obviously a bit better for server side.
For example in this microbenchmark, Chrome is 10x slower than both FF and Safari at one method.
https://jsbenchit.org/?src=cfcb916dd03df45952183e6484a14344
Here's another where in one case Firefox is 54x faster than Chrome
And that, my friends, is essentially what networking is :)
FWIW test262 falls over partway through in Firefox and I have to kill the tab, though it doesn't crash. There are a bunch of test failures as well for things that are probably not implemented by anyone (I'm curious how many of the tests QuickJS actually passes)
My guess for any performance gap would be that the browser runner probably sets up an entirely separate execution context (iframe?) to run each test cleanly so they don't interfere with each other.
While V8 has added a fast first-stage interpreter there are probably a ton of other overheads when starting a V8 context as well as "inefficiencies" related to preparing code for later JIT optimizations.
So for more CPU intensive code written in JS where the JIT activates the tables shifts radically, compare QuickJS with V8 (JIT-less) and V8 (JIT) on benchmarks, particularly Raytrace, Crypto and NavierStokes that should be pushing the computation performance. https://bellard.org/quickjs/bench.html
In executing one computationally intensive program, V8 would be many orders of magnitude faster than my program. But in a test which largely consists of running tens of thousands of small, uninteresting test case programs, my silly interpreter would outperform V8 by orders of magnitude.
Essentially, performance is complicated, and improving throughput often has costs in other areas.
Look at DOM performance. Chrome has a ceiling of about 45m ops/s where FF max speed is dependent upon your ram and bus speed reaching beyond 4-5b ops/s. In both though querySelectors perform at about the same speeds as slow as 25000 ops/s.
I have written an OS GUI that executes in the browser. It loads, including full state restoration in about 120ms. I was recently interviewing with a search engine company, one of the big ones, where I could demonstrate that JavaScript tool can execute file system search much faster than the OS and produce better results. They seemed really impressed.
Despite all of this my biggest learning about performance is that mentioning performance during job interviews shows that you are incompatible with other JavaScript developers and will not be hired.
As someone who done plenty of JS, cares about performance and also has handled hiring for JS positions in the past, I can tell you that this is generally not true. Caring about performance is not a reason to not get hired.
But it is possible to be "technically superior" in every conceivable way, but still not be a good hire. Why? Because the candidate might be missing vital soft skills or even not be very good at describing their thoughts, something that can slow down an entire team.
"Learning the wrong lesson" when things go wrong would also be something I'd consider high up for reasons to reject a candidate.
No one is working towards degrading performance on purpose, and caring about performance is not "a massive incompatibility to hiring". But the fact that you keep stating this makes it clear that there seems to be plenty of other reasons organizations are not hiring you.
You are not participating in the same interviews that I am then. Most developers know querySelectors, for example, are super slow. They will fight to death to retain them and anybody who suggests any alternative is not compatible for hiring. If they know its slow and deliberately choose to avoid faster alternatives how is that not degrading performance on purpose? How is that not common?
What do you mean? How do you search the file system without calling into the OS?
> "I was recently interviewing with a search engine company, one of the big ones, where I could demonstrate that JavaScript tool can execute file system search much faster than the OS and produce better results. They seemed really impressed."
With the DOM querySelectors are dramatically slower than using static methods with arbitrary strings as arguments. This is likely because a query string must be parsed against each child node to determine if the child node is a match to the supplied query. Likewise, modern OSs use ancient conventions to search the file system, such as wildcards, along with more modern advanced search syntax. These are rules that must be parsed against each child artifact from a tree segment. My application deliberately doesn't do that.
To compound matters Windows, don't know about OSX, caches search results so that subsequent searches are a little less slow, which incurs a greater performance penalty on first search. My application doesn't do that either. Each search triggers tree traversal, so its always as fast reading from the file system.
Mentioning any of this during a job interview makes for intriguing conversation with the interviewer. I do detect genuine interest and curiosity from the interviewer. At the same time they know their team will fight to the death at many mention of alternatives to querySelectors and/or JSX, so you have just effectively terminated the interview. Anything there after is purely for the interviewer's personal interests.
My biggest gripe is the lack of shared bookmarks and passwords between browsers. There are 3rd party extensions and what not to do some of this (eg 1password), but nothing beats the UX of true browser integration. I wish there was a single standard with pluggable backends so I had no switching costs. Quite frankly I’m surprised Firefox doesn’t just use the Mac keychain and share bookmarks with Safari in order to gain market share.
- Chrome v99: 204
- Safari: 266
How come I fall so far short of the post's advertised fastest-of-any-browser 300?
Edit: Running in incognito got me a 251, so some of the slowdown must be from extensions.
Edit 2: Seems like 1password and uBlock Origin decrease the score by around 30 each, I got a 276 with both disabled.
- Chrome v99: 168
- Firefox v97: 132
- Safari v15: 139
Of course I forgot to benchmark Chrome _before_ I updated it. :(
- Chrome 98: 157
- Chrome 99: 157
- Firefox 97: 104
- Edge 99: 146
Oh well.
Chrome v98: 290 Chrome v99: 316 Safari : 278
All were with incognito/private browsing to remove the effect of extensions
"Data source for Mac statistics: Speedometer 2.0 comparing Chrome 99.0.4812.0 --enable-features=CanvasOopRasterization --use-cmd-decoder=passthrough "
Every time we did a milestone performance improvement in our infrastructure, e.g. search used to take few seconds, we reduced it to few milliseconds. One year later our colleagues were doing machinegun-like queries and the search was back to take 1 second, and it is just a matter of time to go back to few seconds.
One thing that helped a lot was hard limits, e.g. InternetExplorer9 having hard cap on css size was literally the only thing that forced people not to push megabytes of css.
I wish Chrome does something similar, like 'you cant have more than 500kb of js code evaluated per page' or 'no more than 200kb css', it will do miracles in just one year, and I am willing to bet that we will have the same features we would without the limit.
EDIT: I did not mean to undervalue Chrome's 49% improvement in one year, which is just extraordinary work!
The median is around 2MB, up from 1.5MB 5 years ago.
I use Safari because of Chrome's memory bloat, Safari's text message MFA auto-fill features, and Safari's cross-platform (iOS/macOS) password manager.
What do you think of Firefox? :)
For such a long time Firefox didn't take being a native Mac OS citizen seriously, with scrolling not being natively implemented, form fields feeling "off" and in general just feeling like a Windows app in a Cocoa window.
Luckily those days are long gone now, and Firefox now feels much more like a native app, save for a couple of dialog boxes here and there. But having used iCloud Keychain for such a long time, and there being no option to import my 500+ passwords, it really has been a pain in the ass to switch browsers.
EDIT: Firefox gets a 1336
However, and I think this is important to bring up, browsers are basically the same speed and the reason to use one over the other is largely down to ergonomics and larger concerns. On the "larger concerns" side, Chrome is a failure. Chrome exists so the advertising company Google can track you and sell you targetted ads. It can do this in reasonable ways and it can do this in unreasonable ways, and with attacks on privacy like FLoC. Chrome is doing exactly what Internet Explorer was doing for microsoft in the 2000s and I think it's appropriate to call out that fact.
I am not seeing any other programming language continuously improve their execution speed this much.
> We know that benchmarks are just one of many ways of measuring the speed of a browser.
This is very true, and with a few notable exceptions my experience is that Safari feels faster across the board even where it has consistently benched slower. This likely has less to do with runtime performance and more to do with process isolation models. I feel confident about that because Safari tends to be more liberal with spawning new processes, and that’s where I experience its pathological edge cases.
(Chrome starts to pool processes by domain sooner than Safari, which puts less pressure on the OS but more on operations within a given domain; Safari creates processes per tab more consistently but ultimately degrades overall app performance and eventually system performance too.)
Basically: More Tabs = Pooling is more performant, less tabs individual process is more performant.
I don't know how true that is, but I'm fairly certain that is what GP is trying to get across.
Really?
I think many people "around the world" have more pressing issues than saving a couple of milliseconds while "shopping for a new pair of headphones".
Especially when everyone knows the real speed bump across all browsers, devices and OSes is to aggressively filter out ads, something Chrome is actively fighting with Manifest V3.
i confess, i don't think it matters a lot for most users how fast the system is. safari, chrome, whatever, they're close. but it's still pretty revolting that apple insists on their own reality distortion field, that they cannot engage in a healthy & honest discussion about how and why they block off choice.
This is why we had months of people raving about M1, of course.
i joke. but also, i think where we're hearing these reports from are only semi-important. even with far far far far far superior hardware- 200/400GBps memory- a vast gain- plus other architectural wins- my temptation would still be to call this an incremental (but sizable) win, not revolutionary.
The truth is this is the same kind of stuff Chrome (and any browser) has been working on since the software launched. Regardless of which devices come out nobody has ever said "I like that this browser is slower and less efficient than the other".
^ I stopped reading at this point, because I realised that this is something that only someone on a marketing team would write. A perfect combination of incorrect and disingenuous.
Can't comment about account being banned.
To be fair, this is the same company pushing Manifest V3, which might kill adblocking as we know it
Details here: Chromeisbad.com
Keystone globally slows down UI and drains battery life, especially notable on older machines. Completely uninstalling chrome felt like upgrading to a new CPU on my 2013 MacBook.
I switched to FireFox for my personal use a few years before the "Quanutm" update when it was theoretically much worse than Chrome and didn't notice a difference. For the last few years, I've been using Chrome and FireFox side by side with Chrome for work and FireFox for my own stuff and switching back and forth feels pretty seamless. (With the exception of Gmail which is abysmal on FireFox, but I somehow doubt that's Mozilla's fault)
Come to think of it, I primarily use chrome to double check UI changes on a page served from my local computer. That’s probably the main reason it feels faster.
I wonder if they could work on Memory usage next.
Compared to Safari, getting jank from Address bar, bookmark, history, show all tabs, SafariBookMarkSyncAgent is leaking memory. It seems every release Safari added more features and bug fix for compatibility while performance has been in steady decline.
But Chrome still has some work to do on rendering performance. The switch to hardware acceleration was actually a deceleration for quite a few cases. For example rendering very large concave SVG paths is probably 10x faster on Firefox compared to Chrome. I hope to see some effort in future to improve this, too.
If you're stuck on some un-upgradable old budget device, it's unlikely the memory holding you back either.
I have 64GB of memory total and about 16-32 of it is in use for virtual machines, which is reasonable.
How much total memory do you expect the average computer to have?
This seems a bit tone deaf with a war going on?
1) "while browsing the web", not "in life";
2) This is an article about a web browser and the article isn't trying to compare browsers to real life scenarios, let alone wars...