Internet Explorer 8 runs ten times faster with Google Chrome plug-in
news.techworld.com
news.techworld.com
Microsoft: "here's our best stab at what a great browser looks like - and it took us 14 years to get here".
Google: "we've been working on a codebase for 2 years. We decided to release it as a patch to your browser. Our brief foray into this area has improved your best effort by 10x".
Ouch!
So actually, the opposite is true: MS has a big economic incentive to slow down JS performance in browsers, because it will make them more money selling desktop softare. One way to do this is to release new versions of IE which have slow JS interpreters, and use marketing to convince enterprise customers that the new browsers are super-duper top-of-the-line shiny things, with features like security and easy maintainability.
Then why haven't they made it as fast as a grad student volunteer did in 2 months for FireFox [1]? This kind of stuff has been pretty well researched in the past couple of decades :-P
1. Scroll to "How We Did It", here: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/08/trac...
Is it really so hard to imagine what life on the inside looks like?
Microsoft is a huge institution. There are hundreds of engineers working on IE. Their work is segmented and bucketed. Some poor engineer has probably spent the last several years doing nothing but maintaining the EOT font format. There are reorganizations, new decisions to realign the next release to meet the goals of other teams, etc. Every decision -- at any level -- requires buy-in from multiple parties with overlapping responsibility. There are, in short, too many cooks in the kitchen.
I'm not saying it isn't ridiculous. But this is how it is inside Microsoft.
I know they have good people in there, but the fact is that they are pulling us back. They couldn't get off their asses to work on IE 7 until Firefox became a credible threat.
This is the most compelling evidence that Microsoft always thinks about preserving the status-quo instead of advancing the state of the art. It's their decision and their company, but I'm not going to accept apologies for them lightly.
They want to change their image, then they should play nicer with their competition and with us. I don't know how they could do that, but off the top of my head ... why not open-source Silverlight to make it a true standard? But they won't do that since they need control. And round and round we go.
This is very true and I've always felt it is a strong condemnation of what goes on inside Microsoft. I neglected to mention this sorry bit of history in my posts above mostly because it's a bit old news. Today, IE is a fully-staffed, heavily armed, etc.
I don't think I apologized for Microsoft. There is no excuse for having previously shut down IE, or for having such poor execution now that the IE team is back. There are, however, explanations... ones which hopefully help to dispel the myth that Microsoft is, today, intentionally holding the browser back. The truth is much more mundane.
Making the browser and web applications a viable alternative to their cash cows (Windows, Office, BackOffice) would seriously compromise the fat bonuses even mid-level executives get and would seriously jeopardize top management's position in front of their shareholders.
It simply does not happen this way. Not with a big public company that enjoy a monopoly with insanely fat margins.
First, it is entirely possible for Microsoft to continue to reap rewards from Windows while improving their browser at the same time. The two are not mutually exclusive. I reject the perspective that says the browser will win at the cost of desktop APIs. Everything has its place.
Second, while Windows may make shareholders (and your hypothetical "mid-level executives") fat today, they are under no illusions that it will make them fat tomorrow. Innovating for the future is an earnest and honest goal at Microsoft. This includes the browser, too. Who is to say where the next cash cow will be?
(Also: for some strange reason, I can't reply directly to you. Why would that be the case?)
The internet is a killing blow for MSFT's business model, because it devalues all their proprietary assets. And when MSFT relents a bit to the internet and tries to play along, it does this with the same business model that sells software with closed standards (Silverlight)or is protected by patent (.net).
The browser represents a piece of software that enforces neither of these business model components that MSFT absolutely depends on, and it represents the door to computer interaction. This is really bad for MSFT as it exists today. MSFT will be a very different company 20 years from now, but I don't expect it will change without a serious fight given what's at stake. We shouldn't be surprised if MSFT engages in some practices which might be anathema to anybody just expecting a good software product from a company with substantial resources.
When people are united behind a clear vision, amazing things can happen. When they're not...
I wrote more about my experience: http://davepeck.org/2008/12/12/meditations-on-microsoft/
Besides that, what kind of talented engineer stays in a company that lacks vision?
So it may not just be the skill of the engine developer, but competing architectures.
On the other, I think it's a stunning display of just how much muscle Google really has to flex (and perhaps more importantly, how much they're willing to flex).
It will be interesting to see how Google continues to treat companies it considers competitors over the next few years. The big guys like Microsoft will be able to handle it; but the smaller guys might have to start getting a little worried.
The muscle flexing is that they're willing to subvert a competitors product instead of just promoting their own product as a superior offering.
Can you imagine the outrage if Microsoft had done this and offered a plugin to Chrome or Firefox that would make them render things just like IE does? If you're having trouble imagining such a scenario, think back to the outcry when people discovered the .Net plugin for Firefox, and that wasn't nearly as invasive.
Google is drawing a line in the sand that essentially says "You can do things your way or our way, but if you don't like our way we'll find a way to make your users do it our way."
To me that seems like a pretty serious escalation.
EDIT: After considering your profile page I fold :)
I would love to compete against Google. I would pretty much beg for the opportunity to do it. Other companies are too reactive; you do something, they do something, the entire competition is just a boring back-and-forth game of mostly minor incremental improvements of dubious benefit to the end users.
But Google? Now that would be fun. A lot of fun. If you let them get ahead of you even once, you've just dramatically decreased your odds of winning, and they have an awful lot of smart people working for them. You'd have to be more nimble, and you'd have to be able to guess at what they were going to do before they did it ... and then you'd have to do it better, and do it before they do.
Beating Microsoft is like playing chess in the park. Beating Google ... that's like playing speed chess with Big Blue. It would be a blast.
I did realize one thing though. While Chrome can never ship with adblock, Arora can, and 0.10.0 out next week will ship with it. :D
I'm no longer as fond of Firefox as I once was. It has persistent memory issues, and is getting more and more bloaty. But, it's also got AB+, and that for a lot of people is a killer feature.
I think there are a bunch of sound counter-arguments to the people saying that AB+ will kill their websites: one, users are sick of websites with more advertising-related content than actual content; two, fake virus alerts and other related ads are now one of the most common vectors for new spyware and malware; three, the ad revenue model is already starting to fall over due to over saturation, and maybe it's time that website owners start looking for a better way to do it.
So, thank you. I'll be trying out the next release of Arora.
There are perfectly good reasons to block ads, but far too many people take a brute force approach to it that will result in good sites going away, or charging users instead of advertisers. I think both of those outcomes suck. If you want to block ads, I'm sure you can spare 30 seconds to let people know why and how to get you to stop.
Can someone point to an application where this performance improvement can be demonstrated?
Why wasn't there a post about this before? This post must be complete bullshit.
(8 times faster code doubles the speed once, doubles the speed twice, and doubles the speed a third time.)
Also, although it is hard to believe, some people actually think IE is a good browser. I don't understand how or why, but some people actually do.
We recently gave up on GWT at work for precisely the reason that IE6 and friends are waaaay too slow to do anything meaningful in GWT. Had we had this option we might have stuck with GWT instead of rewriting in Flex.
A website could just put a big "Speed up this application" button that installs the Chrome Frame plugin, and as far as the end-user is concerned, it's just like installing Flash - and they're still "using" internet explorer.
The target audience for this is not the people who are interested in Chrome; it's the people who aren't interested in moving away from IE.
Changing browsers requires aquiring new habbits. Most people don't like change. On the other hand, they're already familiar with the concept of a browser plugin thanks to Flash and Accrobat. The Google Chrome Frame can be understood as a speed booster and a bunch of additional features for IE rather than a new browser.
Edit: Icey burn me to it.
this will just hasten the migration away. its probably not a huge win for anyone with respect to directly converting it into migrations to another browser, because the people who were clueless about switching probably still will be.
its just a really nice selling point when you have the ear of someone, trying to convert them.
They tested using the SunSpider javascript benchmark: http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html