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Puffin Browser

puffinbrowser.com

36 pointsdutchbrit22 comments

I'm wondering how the Snowden revelations affect companies like them. Having all your mobile browsing pass though a single point in the US probably doesn't sound like a good idea anymore to many of their potential users.

Also, I'd like to know whether they have the same kinds of speed improvement when loading resources over SSL connections.

Has anyone pulled this thing apart? I am curious how they can claim 5x speed improvement for JavaScript compared to Safari.

AFAIK third party apps still cannot use a JIT because they cannot execute dynamically generated code. Wonder what is behind those claims.

Yes, we reverse engineered Puffin 2.x and implemented a partially featured client in python. We used this client to run map reduce on puffin's servers. You can read about some of the benchmarks we measured here:

http://ix.cs.uoregon.edu/~butler/pubs/acsac12.pdf

The short answer to your question is they run and render all the js/html/css in a server farm (rackspace when we benchmarked it) and send the client a rendered stream of the contents. The paper above gives the benchmarks we measured.

Note: all the above is only relevant to Puffin 2.x. Im not sure how much has been redesigned for 3.x None of the above may be correct for current versions.

That's one hell of a serious privacy problem!

They claim to have a "revolutionary JavaScript engine" that is 5.5x faster on sunspider than chrome on android and safari on ios. The only way that could possibly be true is if they run the JS on the server, which has a faster CPU than a mobile device.

If so, they're being extremely disingenuous. Sure, you might be able to run those benchmarks faster, but the latency would eat up all of your gains and then some in any practical scenario.

It's probably the same tech as the kindle cloud acceleration tech. Basically the server (cloud) accelerates the page by fetching all dependent objects in parallel on th faster network, then send the result over a single compressed channel. This saves the chatty nature of http and if modified since requests and of course the startup/tear down times per origin server.

It looks like a lot of stuff is prerendered. Check their pro version which offers "unlimited Adobe Flash minutes". I guess it's a VNC-like tunnel.

Does anyone else find that the Puffin (bird) has a sort of natural worried look to it, making it a poor choice for a logo?

I would characterize it as a sad, kitten-lost-in-the-rain kind of look.

https://www.google.com/search?q=puffin&source=lnms&tbm=isch&...

But yeah, I agree, not exactly a cool, edgy logo like a "firefox" or "atom"...

The puffin is one of my favorite birds (perhaps second only to the toucan), and as such, I felt compelled to recommend this browser to my friends and colleagues solely on the basis of the chosen bird.

I had to stop myself before realizing that I should learn more about the software first, maybe even try it myself.

It does indeed look a little depressed when you google for puffin picture but none the less it's a beautiful creature, makes for a good and recognisable logo.

So it essentially has a server that pre-processes javascript going through it to increase speed...cool. Not foolproof, but cool.

Digging around online, a bunch of users have submitted their own speed test results[1][2]. There are some concerns that the way it does this is unreliable for large multimedia websites and is potentially insecure/buggy. And, of course, a lot of people hate how it looks, claiming in particular that it sacrifices stability for the speed increases.

Personally, I don't want everything I'm doing being streamlined through a secondary server just for a speed boost, but I can see why this is attractive.

[1]:http://wi.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/17rwg1/insanely_fast...

[2]:http://www.techjamaica.com/forums/showthread.php?110199-Is-P...

Call me paranoid, but outsourcing my browser engine to the cloud is not something I'd consider in the current privacy climate.

It does feel relatively fast from basic usage, but as long as Apple doesn't let me change my default browser I'll have to pass. Clicking links anywhere else just opens Safari, which is a bummer.

As for the fact that they send my web activity to their own servers for pre-processing, I'm not sure how I feel about that. I'd feel a little more comfortable if their servers were outside of the US (are they? I don't know).

They're inside the US, but then again I would be hesitant to trust any such third party cloud service no matter where it's located.

I've been using this for a while as a secondary browser on my Nexus 4, very convenient in places where 3g coverage is bad.

This said, in my everyday use, it's far less convenient than Chrome, mostly because of its tab design/experience, and a few text selection bugs I had.

So, all in all, I'd recommend anyone to have this browser installed, "just in case".

I just noticed that both puffin's web site and the browser itself, are blocked in my area. Some place in Beijing, China. I am not sure if it is the same to other ISP or company in Beijing.

After connected using vpn( this is able to watch youtube HD videos ), It works but speed is terribly slow at beginning. But then, it runs FAST.

here the screenshot [pic.twitter.com/IneqTYhyc2](http://t.co/IneqTYhyc2)

Graphics nazi here to help.

The puffin icon looks sad. The speed graphic at the bottom should run left to right. Put a download button after the speed graphic.

The speed graphic at the bottom should run left to right.

It already does. the puffins are going towards the left because the goal is zero, whereas if they were pointing to the right it would look like they were chasing slower browsers.

So this is basically the same as Opera Turbo (edit: or now called Opera Offroad)?

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