JavaScript Performance in Windows 10 Technical Preview | Hacker News Reader

JavaScript Performance in Windows 10 Technical Preview

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I have to hand it to IE these days, their performance boasts aren't just lip service. They are definitely outpacing Chrome and FF on canvas performance.

Chrome used to dither between best and second best in performance in the last 4 years, but for some time now IE10 + 11 have been the fastest browsers at rendering 2D Canvas paths/primitives/images by a huge margin.

I develop a canvas-based library and have a series of tests[1] that also serve as a (somewhat practical than usual) benchmark for how browsers compare when using canvas. Here's how long it takes to complete the tests on the big three:

    FF nightly: 17.713 seconds
    Chrome dev: 13.123 seconds
         IE 11:  7.83 seconds

Chrome had an edge when I started out with canvas stuff, now IE is almost twice as fast as Chrome.

[1] you can run the tests yourself here: http://gojs.net/latest/tests/index.html but remember that its only meaningful if you compare results on the same machine.

It's easy to do this when you only need to address a single platform. Most of that overhead is probably bound to graphics layer overhead. Microsoft tightly couples to DirectX. Chrome has to sit on top of SKIA to support Win/Linux/OSX/Android.

I bet Safari Canvas performance is also high, since they can directly bind to OSX.

> I bet Safari Canvas performance is also high, since they can directly bind to OSX.

On my machine (old MBP, 10.9.5)

Firefox 33: 35.2s

Safari 7.1: 18.57s

Chrome 34[0]: 28.6s

[0] yes I know it's not up to date

on my 2012 rMBP running 10.10:

Firefox 33: 33.255

Safari 8.0: 16.454

Chrome 38: 22.048

I should install Windows 10 tech preview underbootcamp and see how that goes.

I get 12.287 secs under Safari 8/Yosemite on a Mac Pro (2014) 8-core.

15.9 secs on Chrome Canary (40.x)

20.3 secs on FF30.

My guess is IE11 1) has lower OS/driver overhead and 2) accelerates more Canvas ops and does less software rendering than other platforms.

They just need to make use of respective hardware accelerated APIs in each targeted platform.

There are a lot of dragons hiding in that "just".

I recall being blown away by IE10 svg performance - is it still the fastest there too?

EDIT: Surprisingly, svg benchmarks are hard to find. All I get is Canvas benchmarks.

Not really a benchmark, but anecdata, but for us at work (we're doing graph drawing, layouting, and editing using SVG for graphics in the browser) IE is consistently fastest, Chrome comes second and Firefox usually last.

SVG doesn't seem to be much of a priority for them, sadly.

It really feels like a vicious cycle at times, doesn't it? Nobody uses it because it's slow, it's slow because nobody uses it.

Now I'm curious which video driver features they depend on for full optimizations. Running on a current MacBook Air inside VMWare Fusion, IE11 and Chrome have very similar performance:

IE11 in a VM: 24.874

Chrome in a VM: 24.137

As an aside, I'm impressed that the overhead of running in VMWare was that fast. It's within a factor of two of the best native performance:

FF 33: 24.577

Chrome: 16.908

Safari: 13.004

So running Chrome or IE in a VM is equivalent to running Firefox natively?

Using VMWare Fusion 6 on my system, yes. I suspect native drivers would differ.

I swithed from chrome to IE a few weeks before. Because IE is faster. And my computer is quieter using IE.

I'm trying to use IE11, but the #1 issue I find are document modes.

I often find sites which set the wrong document mode (ex. IE9), and the site behaves broken in comparison with the IE11 document mode. (Basically people taking for granted that every IE is a faulty browser, and giving up completely).

Plus, having zero ability to tell IE: "Fuck the Internet, I want to use the newest document mode for everything!!!" is a really negative misfeature.

If anyone from the IE team reads this: Please, add a system policy to force a document mode unless compatibility mode is enabled.

It's a question of who gets the last word, though. Originally I thought that web devs should have the last word about IE document mode, because darn it, they own their site. After seeing so many sites that seem to be unmaintained (or maintained by uninformed devs) I am also leaning towards the user having the ultimate say.

I personally think that the configuration set by web developers should be respected by default, but the same way there is a "Compatibility Mode" that enforces a legacy document mode, there should be something that enforces the most recent document mode.

Feel free to vote up the suggestion on User Voice[1] so we see that more people want this feature and prioritize it correctly. I felt it prudent to leave out the suggested name, as much as I like it ;)

[1] https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/257854-internet-explorer-...

I'm curious about what kind of security stuff IE12 supports. Does it support new curves like Curve25519? HSTS? In many cases, even if Chrome and Firefox are more pro-active about modern crypto, IE ends up holding them back for years. I wish that stop being the case with the new versions.

Also, unrelated to IE, but why doesn't Windows 10 add out of the box encryption like iOS8 and Android L? (one where Microsoft doesn't get to keep the keys in its cloud - I hope that's clear).

IE12 isn't released so I doubt the feature set is fully established. The status.modern.ie site has been mentioned on HN a few times though, and it does have some info. https://status.modern.ie/?term=hsts

I'd love to see them harness the new-found underdog energy they have and develop a proper Mac/Linux port of IE that they can maintain alongside the desktop version.

I honestly do my best to test across all the modern browsers when I develop, but having to spin up a random VM running whatever version of windows they require for whatever the edge version of IE is starts to get old after a while.

If the Chrome and Firefox teams can maintain multiple architectures and release them in lock-step, it's certainly possible for Microsoft to start on the road to this process, even if it takes them a couple of years.

And would open-sourcing the browser really kill them?

> And would open-sourcing the browser really kill them?

No idea why not, but it's a different group than MS's other Open Sourcing efforts; The Dev tools people are happy to show their ASP.net mvc work[1], among other things[2], but IE falls under their Windows group, so it's a different set of people making the decisions.

[1] http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest

[2] https://roslyn.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest (hell yeah)

If they have functioning brain they should - decouple the browser from the OS and then sue apple for anti competitiveness if the browser engine is not allowed on the ios store (MS is one of the few companies that could reasonably well pull this off)

I might be wrong, but as far as I am aware the last time Apple and Microsoft faced each other in court was when Apple sued Microsoft in 1988. When the dust settled, IE was the default Mac browser and Microsoft owned $150m of Apple stock.

I wouldn't bet on Microsoft and Apple ever suing each other again.

Internet Explorer is a relatively simple executable that relies on other Windows DLLs to do pretty much everything that needs to be done. Check out the architecture here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa741312.aspx

Ideally just the Trident rendering engine (in MSHTML.dll) could be ported to other platforms for web developer use, but I don't know how reliant on other Windows features it is. I also don't think it's much of a priority (or at all feasible) for the IE team to re-architect their entire product, but I would love for them to prove me wrong.

Microsoft still lives and breathes with their old proprietary software licensing model. There would have to be some sort of major gain for them to port the browser outside of their ecosystem.

I can see them doing it with IE mobile though as they aren't the most popular player in the mobile market and they need to get people hooked.

It would also be nice if Apple could develop a Safari for Windows. Right now we have javascript bugs we cannot debug without buying a Mac.

People who still hate on IE are living in the past. Its been many years since the "fuck the web" days of Microsoft.

Not just living in the past, but in a specific slice of the past since in the era of IE3 (pre-Webkit/pre-Chrome/when Netscape was big on turning the browser into an Office Suite), IE was by far the best web browser.

That aside, while I do think modern IE is quite a good web browser and I mostly use Windows, I still use Chrome as my primary browser because it is everywhere (on my phone, on Linux, on Chromebooks) and IE is only on Windows.

Do keep in mind lots of us are forced to live in the past.

Developing a large app for healthcare, we MUST support IE 6, and IE 6 alone.

> we MUST support IE 6,

This part sucks.

> and IE 6 alone.

But at least you have this. It's a hell of a lot worse when you're trying to support IE 6 and other browsers too.

Wonder if they have custom support for WinXP.

I still find many more problems in IE than in any other current browser. Here's my last bug report.

https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedbackdetail/view/940661/...

I suppose it's an improvement

1) that there is a place to make the bug report

2) and a human actually responded

It's cool (for those who don't have a choice / don't understand that they have a choice) that it's getting better, but when you release version 6 of your software that comes pre-installed on millions of computers, and that software chooses to ignore standards and do things a different way, requiring many many dev hours wasted on making compatibility layers...don't expect devs to forget quickly.

When you then go on to do the same thing with versions, 7, 8, and 9 of your software, all broken in new and exciting ways, mostly requiring different versions of your OS to test on...don't expect many people to still develop software for you browser platform. Fool me once, etc.

I'll make things compatible with IE again when they switch to WebKit or actually follow the standards.

It hasn't been that many years. Time aside, the past isn't completely over yet until those browsers are gone.

I am glad to see the change of approach though.

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