'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 …
Couple of things:
Get a better computer. 100% or 75%.... Seriously! Close some apps, format or just upgrade
I don't need to move my mouse over the JS boxes to use the search on Bing
The Bing thing is at least trying to be useful. (Random topic's daily of obsecure but sometimes interesting stuff)
Google has been praised for YEARS for it's "clean" image. Bing isn't after that - hence the rather lovely backgrounds it puts on everyday. Google went backwards.
I'm being deliberately awkward here - but how much fossil fuel generated energy did Google just consume? They can deplot this from their bloody labs in the US and inflict it on other nations... seriously, anyone got the smarts to do an estimate based on the number of dumb terminals - sorry - users who don't bother with alternative Google landing pages?
Dicking around like this looks pretty but constant fiddling usually results in BORKING.
I thought the article was about the orange "buckyball" spiraling whizzing logo of the other day. But no, it's a new daft useless whizzer that we don't need.
I did not see this latest one since I switched to www.google.co.uk/firefox as my home page when the buckballs logo appeared and it does not have the logo. The new floating-bouncing-balls one is much less intensive on my PC but still undesirable to me.
No CPU suckage here on FF on Mac OS (different matter when running on FreeBSD 8.1)
The animation only seems to work with Chrome and FF with browser sniffing used on Safari and Opera. This is *the wrong thing to do*™ with HTML5 and it's also a pointless animation that adds very little to the page. But then again it's limited to the UK Google homepage which I guess doesn't get that many visitors now that all browsers have search boxes.
I quite like it, actually. Although I didn't realise it *was* an animation at first. I just figured the computer was busy doing some indeterminate-Windows-background-grindy-stuff. It was only after I glanced up and noticed it was a slightly different position I realised it was actually an odd sort of slideshow.
As for this latest thing about the exploding coloured spots, I decided it was probably better to use the toolbar search. Although the interactive animation does work prettily well on Ubuntu*.
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* Yes, I know: *everything's* better in Linux...
I just accessed the Google home page via Chrome, running under Linux (Eeebuntu) on my Asus Eee 701SD (630MHz Celeron CPU, 512Mb RAM). If any recent PC could be brought to a shuddering halt by the Google ball demo, you'd think it would be an early (2007) netbook...
Yes, Chrome ended up using about 45% of the CPU when the balls were at their most active, but the load average didn't get above 1.3 (and that was with Rhythmbox playing an Ogg Vorbis file at the same time). The machine stayed perfectly usable throughout.
Not to be smug or anything, but if a 3GHz-packing PC can be brought down by this demo, whilst a comparatively weedy netbook barely breaks a sweat... erm, might the OS and/or browser be a factor here?
Tux, 'cos there's no "light blue touchpaper" icon yet ;-)
Another forum mentioned this, but all I can see is the vanilla google page.
Browsers tried:
IE6 (I know, I know, corporate install)
Firefox 3.5 Windows
Firefox 3 Linux
Logged out of "google account" (for gmail). Not using https. Tried .com and .co.uk . Just a static picture.
Has it been taken down?
The article is talking about an HTML5 animation of a buckyball that went live on Saturday (3 days ago! nothing like current news content ...).
Today's doodle is a bunch of dots that move according to your mouse gestures and settle down into the logo if you don't do anytihng. That's written in JavaScript.
Seems to me there are two things being talked about here - or should i get my coat?
Sorry, but something else must be sucking up your CPU, I tested Google's homepage with both cores (AMD X2 Kuma) and with only one core. No matter how much I move my mouse around and play with the doodle, my CPU never goes above 40% in single core or using both cores.
On my laptop (Intel Core2Duo) I also tested Google's homepage with both cores 49%, with one core 47%.
Perhaps all of you are running too many addons, don't have the latest Firefox, or something else entirely.
El Reg never made such a hullabaloo when i sent the same wondrous problem with using THEREGISTER as my home page. Why? FLASH ADS.
Would they listen, did they even report it? NO
In fact, with all these quips from apple about flash posted here, it's fun to note at the time that EL Reg though that Flash worked fine, and it was obviously a problem with the 3 different pc's i was using.
funny how things go innit.
Paris for sheer wonderous humor.
Sir you shouldn't do that so early in the morning, now i have to spend the entire day looking all filthy and dirty from rolling around on the floor laughing at your statement.
Did you use the words bing, google clutter and anti-privacy evil scum in the same sentence trying to infer that google is evil and microsoft isnt?
Wow, you're either a great comedian or frighteningly stupid, i cant determine which...
Fact is that flash animation is a lot more cpu efficient than the same animation implemented in html5. This kind of pointless animation used to get a load of stick (rightly) when it was done in flash (albeit the best tool for the job) as it's entirely superfluous to user experience. Now that it's done in html5 it's now 'cool' to add pointless tat?
It's a bit of fun which (on my PC) didn't raise CPU usage above 12% for FF, Chrome, Safari or IE 8 (it did look shit in IE though, coz the balls stayed the same size instead of getting bigger).
It made no difference to the CPU while it wasn't being used.
If you don't like it, move on.
If you see it as a bit of fun, showing what HTML5 is capable of, then play with it.
Whatever you do though, quit the moaning
Paris, coz even she wouldn't moan like this!
0% CPU usage when just idling. Max I can get is 16% when flinging my balls about. This is using Safari on a ThinkPad X61 (no idea what CPU etc. I have).
However, some useless Symantec thing is gobbling up over 40% of my CPU. Damn you corporate IT. Honestly, having these anti virus things is worse than having a virus...
Jesus. Would you all listen to yourselves? No wonder the IT Crowd is such a successful tv show - it's based on you bunch of retards!!
"buy the latest and greatest tech that can handle it then instead of whinning about it..."
What a dickhead answer - no wonder it was posted AC. Oh and learn to spell whining properly.
"Get NoScript (for Firefox) and don't enable (pointless) Javascript!"
Like 90% of internet users know what the hell your talking about.
"This is genuinely pathetic, who actually needs to spend long enough on the plain, no widget google page for it to even matter?"
A lot of people leave the google homepage up and go for a cup of tea of make dinner. You don't expect it to raise the CPU of your laptop over 25 degrees just for giggles. This poster gives depth to the word pathetic.
"Heaven forbid a company tries to do something different..."
Yet another AC - obviously works for google - probably designed this pointless piece of shit.
"finally you have a use for your cpu"
This one is classic IT crowd - I could just see the moron with the glasses and afro saying this!
"It's no big deal, just use a text-only browser."
This feedback is the gift that keeps on giving.
... or is the real story that browsers are bloated, slow, poorly coded and inefficient, not taking advantage of modern hardware (OK, IE9 apparently uses DirectX for some things - way to lead the curve MS.. DX has been out since W95!) blah blah blah.
Oh, it's also more than a bit to do with the fact that web pages^Wapplications contain embedded programming in the form of Javascript which is making people jump through crazy hoops to produce optimising JIT JS engines in their browsers.
It's time people sat down and worked out what HTML should and should not do. Occasionally some bright ideas come along like out of process plugins, separate processes/threads for separate tabs/windows, private modes which bypass various features, flashblock (which I believe should be on by default for every browser extension in every browser - IE can apparently do this, but it's not the default?) but these ideas are often things which really should have been there from the beginning and which seem pretty obvious now...
Not to mention the craziness that is XmlHttpRequest - if you want a bidirectional communication protocol then design and use a bidirectional data-sharing protocol. That's not really what HTTP is, now, is it?
If this animation slows the machine down then that's the OS's fault for not scheduling things well and if it drains your power then maybe we need to look at OS design and do things like a power cap per application or something?
Oh and why isn't the world on IPv6 yet? We should ditch NAT whilst we're at it as well as kill those proprietary email protocols and get IMAP or something similar up to scratch.
Any volunteers? I'd like it done by pub-o-clock please. I can pay you 20p
"I've probably got the oldest computer of anyone here and..."
Oh, never mind. Suffice it to say that while running Firefox 3.6.8 on an 2001-era 1.4GHz P4 NCR box with Windows XP, and GeForce2 MX graphics, the offending "doodle" doesn't cause any significant problem.
Two ways I can sum it up, pick the one you like:
1. Sometimes "it works and it's paid for" really rings true, eh?
2. Perhaps all of you are running Vista or some equally bloated OS? (Though I'd have expected better from the average El Reg reader...)
I need some advice. Should I bother to switch browsers to FireFox from Opera upon this Cyrix 266 chip (Circa 1998) with 196 mb of ram running, in order to "try" to watch
1. Some sort of new fangled swirly doo hickey thingamijig not go round and about.
2.My machine lock up and some vigorous pc. 3 finger saluting take place?
When the buckyballs were mentioned I thought we were in for some sort of message from the future, "Andromeda effect"...sadly not, it's just another geeky day in Internet land.
I now expect a flurry of posts from people reading el reg on even older "this ole box" (es) than this one...
Running latest stable Firefox on an eeePC (1.6GHz N270), the system loading didn't change much. I can't give an accurate quote, only a look'n'feel, and it didn't seem much different to, like, when a shopping site does all its scripty stuff. The initial swirl-in effect was a bit jumpy, but once the bucky ball was full size, animation was smooth and responsive and followed the mouse nicely.
100% CPU time? Not even close (and, frankly, shouldn't even be possible with a modern OS).
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