'Larry and Sergey's HTML5 balls drained my resources'
Google's latest animated logo on its search homepage has caused a kerfuffle among many surfers whose CPU has been besieged by the ballsy doodle. The Mountain View Chocolate Factory released its fancy HTML5-based BuckyBall animation on Saturday, and immediately users began complaining that it was sucking up too much CPU. Reg …
A pretty simple demonstration of how badly Firefox handles HTML5 canvas in comparison to Chrome. CPU cycles used in chrome are less than 25% of those seen in FFox.
I'm sure this isn't a coincidence, I imagine the doodle was implemented to highlight the difference in performance between the two.
Probably not. Fair enough that I'm using the nightly build of Firefox but it isn't consuming an unreasonable amount of cycles. I can get up to 40% on a fairly weedy Core 2 setup if I really try hard but otherwise it makes next to no difference.
My laptop barely goes above 10% usage (with what i'm running its using 5% for everything else) in both firefox and chrome.
While it is impressive, i imagine some older machines will struggle and google really should've provided a way to turn it off, although fair play iGoogle, https google etc all do just that
i couldn't find any CPU diff between the Browsers on my workstation, must have been a very old pc?
I'm using the latest iteration of Chrome and with 3 tabs open, Outlook and 3 massive spreadsheets open my CPU is only at 23%.
My PC is only a Dell with a 1.8Ghz Core Duo and 1 gig of RAM, so it's not massively powerful.
Probably the people complaining are running various flavours of IE which can't cope with HTML 5 yet...
Its not powerful enough?
"My PC is only a Dell with a 1.8Ghz Core Duo and 1 gig of RAM, so it's not massively powerful."
Not massively powerful? Two CPUs at 1.8 GIGAHertz and ONLY a GB of RAM.. my how our definition of a powerful computer has changed. True you can get much more powerful PCs, perhaps for doing real-time structural analysis of wind-loads on buildings or playing real-time rendered first-person shooters, but for the tasks the average person puts to their computer yours is more than powerful enough. Running a small animation on a web-page should not even register a whole percentage point.
...and that's a pretty puny spec for anything made in the last few years. Additionally, it's not an animated GIF, it's interactive - and it's using Javascript to do the physics. Of course it'll use CPU time.
On my "Generations Old" beast, I hardly saw an impact. Though shes old by technology standards, my little old dual CPU 2.4ghz Shanghai Opteron box only has 16gb of ram and slightly under 600gb of drive space, but it handles the workloads ok, This google page hardly put a dent in the resource usage, I think the hard drives might have helped that a little, putting these old 15k rpm sas drives in a raid 10 sure made a difference in how this old beast performs, so did adding that ancient dual core raid controller, man this old thing sure does pretty good for being three generations old...
It's an embarrassment that modern software is so slow that we need the absolute latest hardware to do basically the same stuff we were doing 7-8 years ago at the same speed.
It's also an embarrassment that some people seem to think this is perfectly normal and acceptable.
Unless you are running a later version of Windows, in which case you need a supercomputer to get good performance. I am always amazed how upgrading to a new PC with a faster multi-core processor and huge memory doesn't result in a noticeable improvement.
your kidding me right? buy the latest and greatest tech that can handle it then instead of whinning about it... its the end of the world for them putting something cool on their website ha ha ha.
"your kidding me right? buy the latest and greatest tech that can handle it then instead of whinning about it... its the end of the world for them putting something cool on their website ha ha ha."
'kin right. I'm showing 70% idle, down from 72. And I have a whole heap of other shit running.
Damn, I smell like jet fighters and punching.
Seriously, buy new kit.
You wouldn't happen to work for Microsoft, would you?
Not everybody'd got the cash to go tossing a few hundred bucks at a new computer every few years. Which is more reasonable: To ask users to buy new computers every three years just to handle obnoxious websites in return for no improvement in basic functionality, or to ask website authors to make less obnoxious websites?
The "computing power is cheap" excuse is apparently the most popular rug in computing for sweeping bad engineering underneath. If computers get twice as fast every few years, then shouldn't they do twice as much as well?
Google used to be the equivalent of freshly squeezed orange juice. Simple, clean and good for you.
Everyday, though, they're rapidly becoming Sunny Delight. Increasing crammed with obnoxious additives and other shit you don't need that isn't good for you.... presented in nice colourful packaging to appeal to the kids.
Maybe I'm just getting old but I do sometimes wish the young, social mediacentric web 2.0 whores being allowed to make decisions like this would just fuck off back to where they came from.
>Everyday, though, [Google are] rapidly becoming Sunny Delight. Increasing crammed with obnoxious additives and other shit you don't need
Every day?
Like what?
A fancy graphic on their birthday (hint: once a year) or on a special occasion (a significant date that's tech/geek/science/education related) after which it reverts to its minimalist interface?
What on earth are you talking about old man? Did your failing eyesight cause you to type in the URL for the Yahoo homepage by mistake? :P
"A fancy graphic on their birthday (hint: once a year) or on a special occasion (a significant date that's tech/geek/science/education related) after which it reverts to its minimalist interface?"
For me, it's not that the minimalist appearance has changed much; but rather the delay incurred by number of scripts the Google homepage loads before becoming stable enough to receive input.
In particular, some change they made several months ago, causes a script to run once the page is apparently "fully loaded" which steals the focus from wherever the cursor may be and jams it into the Google search box. So when I bring up a new browser window with Google as the homepage, then begin typing in the browser address bar, after some random delay--say between 0.5 and 3 seconds-- (presumably affected by local caching, net congestion, and Google's server load) the Google home page "finishes loading" and the script runs and the cursor jumps from where I was typing in the address bar, to the google search box. Resulting in a nonsense "search" consisting of a portion of the URL I was trying to type in the address bar.
I had used www.google.com as my homepage for a full decade, because I liked its minimalist fast-loading nature (and I didn't mind the occasional goofy novelties such as the playable Pac Man game.)
But as of last week I switched my homepage to a local google.html file which is an instant-loading, script-free version of the Google homepage. I don't get "search suggestions" anymore while I type, but nothing steals the input focus while I'm typing, either.
I checked this out on a dual core Linux system. Both CPUs hovered just below 50%. That's a lot of grunt to move a few circles around.
64-bit Ubuntu 10.04, 3.06GHz Core2Duo, 4GB RAM, ATI Radeon 2400HD (1280x1024@32-bit), Google Chrome... less than 4% CPU usage, even when herding the balls all across the screen.
What's wrong with your system?
The linux will always take this much as not so efficient at programs
Get NoScript (for Firefox) and don't enable (pointless) Javascript!
I had to enable it to find out what the fuss was about - funny how this has been reported as a "fancy HTML5-based BuckyBall animation" and yet utterly breaks when you disable JavaScript. Rather tends to imply that this IS JavaScript and NOT (purely) HTML 5 doesn't it?
That's what's pissing me off most about HTML 5 - all the w00t! Look at teh shinies in HTML 5 RAH RAH RAH... actually, I think you'll find it's (bits of) CSS 3, JavaScript and the HTML 5 DOM - all HTML 5 does at the moment is allows you to natively embed videos and improves the semantics of certain markup elements - <canvas> is just a wrapper for scripted graphics; not really any better than the deprecated/defunct <applet> tag IMO.
It's just a markup language for crying out loud!
The really great thing is that this Google doodle isn't even using the canvas element, it's just a normal div with some normal JS applied. Ho hum.
Bouncy though, I do like it.
...to understand why my innocent lil' comment attracted 5 downvotes?!? I can't work out if its a result of the Jeremy Clarksons of PCs (MOAR POWAAAAAAH!), Google employees, or just complete and utter f*ckwits?!
Running on a Lenovo ThinkPad X200 (C2D 1.86GHz, 2Gb RAM) I get these results:
Chrome:
Static (not moving mouse) - 42Mb RAM - 1% CPU
Moving (chasing the balls) - 49Mb RAM - 13% CPU
Firefox:
I get stuck at 49Mb RAM - 5% CPU - but the animation does not load *shrug*
IE8:
Static (not moving mouse) - 63Mb - 1% CPU
Moving (chasing the balls) - 63Mb - 29% CPU
(the balls are smaller and move less elegantly on IE8)
Now that's a brilliant tagline for IE8!!
It is that hide the links bit and fading in, I started by changing search engine. Then of course just use the search box in Firefox.
So of course I never see any different logos now.
I often use Google groups and Google news so that is quicker than using the fade in page.
This is genuinely pathetic, who actually needs to spend long enough on the plain, no widget google page for it to even matter? Yes, everyone has an opinion and that is fine, but to complain about something like this? Find a real damn issue to be vocal about.
seriously? i'm running on a 2ghz single core CPU and i notice no slowdown at all, despite running spotify, pidgin and steam in the background
Google have really lost the plot this time. Famously successful for providing what people want, a clean, plain search/mail/whatever page with no stupid bells and whistles they now seem determined to mess it up.
Other Google daftness avoidance options are;-
www.google.co.uk/firefox - No disappeared magic appearing menu, no logo
www.google.co.uk/aol - I forget check it out yourself:) Perhaps no disappeared magic appearing menu, with logo.
Or .com if that suits you.
If I had been smart enough to buy Google shares I would hope I would be smart enough to be considering selling them now.
If they had used that 'evil' Flash stuff instead we would have at least had the option of blocking it!
There's very little change in CPU usage on my Mac.
This HTML5 Google logo doesn't work on my iPhone either! Steve!!! How could you let me down!!
So it seems Steve Jobs was right: HTML5 can do everything Flash can do... including using all your CPU time.
"fancy HTML5-based BuckyBall animation". How come it's not playing on the iPhone or iPad? I think there's something we're not being told.
>> "How come it's not playing on the iPhone or iPad"
you're holding it wrong.
it is not HTML5, it is not HTML5, it is not HTML5
It HAS been written above - read all comments before you post!
Boring people find something else to complain about.
Complaining about wasting electricity because of a animated logo? Christ. Scurry back to where ever you came from! Heaven forbid a company tries to do something different...
That's the sound of the original comment's electricity joke rushing past about 50 miles above your head.
Or (If you are using Firefox), just install the Scroogle SSL toolbar plugin and and see the results sans the advertising/bullshit and tracking.
2.4Ghz Core2Duo, runs at 20-30% CPU when I poke it in the balls, drops down to nothing a couple of seconds after I stop.
To paraphrase El Jobso, 'No big deal, Just stop playing with your balls'
idiots. stop complaining.
finally you have a use for your cpu
It's no big deal, just use a text-only browser.
Actually, it works fine for me in FF on Kubuntu. Perhaps I'm doing it wrong. :)
Go to bing, wait for it to load.
Move mouse over the picture - now move mouse in a circle (say).
Look at cpu meter!
I get 100% usage. On the Google thing I get 75%.
Fun, eh?
Haven't used their site I am a modeller not a toy collecter,
