back to article Google launches Octane JavaScript benchmark suite

Always in search of new ways to show off the work they've done to improve performance of the Chrome browser, Google's Chrome team has unveiled a new JavaScript benchmark suite, called Octane. The new suite includes all of the tests that were part of the Chocolate Factory's earlier V8 Benchmark Suite but adds a new set of …

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  1. Mark C Casey

    Interesting

    One good thing to come out of these kind of tests and the introduction Chrome has been to give other browsers a good swift kick up the arse.

    Mozilla had gotten pretty lazy and were coasting on cruise control for a while. Safari, well.. Safari hasn't really changed all that much. MS IE has improved but it's still a boring browser to use.

    *WARNING RANT AHEAD*

    I wish Mozilla would put a bit more attention and thought into their mobile browser though, they've become obsessed with speed to the point that the user experience is suffering. It has a UI that is meh at best and it renders in 16bit colour.. 16BIT COLOUR. On websites where there is shading between colours etc the banding is horrible. Why Mozilla think it's acceptable in 2012 to use 16 bit colour beggars belief. To my knowledge it is the only mobile browser on the android platform that renders in 16 bit fricking colour.

    Apparently 65,536 colours is enough instead of 16.7 million...

    1. Tom 7

      Re: Interesting

      65,536 colours is too many! We used to have 216 web safe colours and the bloody meetings went on for hours then!

      But, seriously, I can pretty much guarantee that you 65,536 colours don't look anything like the 65,536 colours on my machines and if you get banding its probably not a 65,536 colour picture anyway. Save the image and have a look outside the browser. GIGO.

    2. Ryan Kendall
      Megaphone

      Re: Interesting

      My Mobile provider "O2" compresses images so on Firefox Mobile its not just bad colour, It;s pixellated too.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Useless pissing match

    Who cares about 5ms time saved while page rendering, especially when it's a benchmark by Google themselves that says so. All browsers are already good enough.

    Hope no one here is retarded enough to run computationally intensive code written in Javascript on their web browsers.

    Seriously Google is becoming more like Microsoft every day, reminds me of the time Veritest published the Microsoft-sponsored benchmark showing Windows Server performing twice as fast as Linux.

    1. vic 4
      Unhappy

      Re: All browsers are already good enough

      You'd be surprised the demands full featured web apps can place on a browser. There is a lot of enterprise applications that better performance can have a great affect on. These people are doing a lot more than filling a shopping basket, they may have maps that are being updated, performing data analysis which requires instant access to lots of data or integrated collabaration tools to give a few examples. Plus, some of these apps need to work offline, so work can't always be bundled off to the server.

      Better performance doesn't just make current stuff work better but makes new functionality possible.

      1. Sean Timarco Baggaley

        Re: All browsers are already good enough

        @Vic 4: "You'd be surprised the demands full featured web apps can place on a browser."

        Not really. I'm far more surprised by the fact so many people seriously consider a bloody web browser to be a good fit for "full featured" applications.

        1. vic 4

          Re: All browsers are already good enough

          @Sean: It is an excellent fit for many enterprise applications, for those that aren't then use something else. And a trend likely to continue for a fair while yet.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Well yeah,

    Chrome might be the 'fastest' browser when executing this set of tests that have been specifically designed to make it look good. However, it still crashes all the time so is still an utter fail that I will avoid using wherever possible.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Well yeah,

      Might want to get your system checked out then. Using even the beta builds on Linux, Windows, an OS X are rock stable.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Well yeah,

        Hitting a breakpoint and then prodding some variables from the console is a game of Russian roulette in chrome, with a far less healthy survival rate. Firefox is slow and steady in this regard while IE developer tools are completely laughable, 10 years behind the times and seem to be designed by someone with a pathological hatred of programmers.

  4. nigel 15

    5559

    is that good?

    actually on the point hough. who cares. i have no issues with the speed of my browser.

  5. Grant Mitchell
    Stop

    On the ipad safari kicks chrome's ass

    919 vs 205

    1. nigel 15
      Megaphone

      Re: On the ipad safari kicks chrome's ass

      that is interesting because on the nexus 7 chrome scores 1356

      like 6x the ipad score.

    2. Mark C Casey
      Stop

      Re: On the ipad safari kicks chrome's ass

      Chrome on the ipad is a reskin of the safari webkit engine without the nitro js engine.

      All browsers on IOS devices have to use the Safari webkit engine and they are forbidden from using their own rendering or javascript engines. So, the only browser that can use a fast js engine is Apples own Safari.

      Oh and to reiterate my previous point above, here is the Mozilla bugzilla post on the 16 bit colour issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=694828

      They're pretty much sitting on it.

  6. mhenriday
    Linux

    Tried this myself on 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04, with the following results :

    Firefox Nightly 17.0a1 (2012-08-19) :6059

    Chrome 21.0.1171.0 dev : 9661

    Test conditions far from identical, as on Chrome I ran Octane with one (1) tab open, while on Nightly i had 221 (sic !) tabs open. Hardly fair, but I don't want to lose those tabbed pages....

    Henri

  7. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    Javascript and 16-bit color

    "'Hope no one here is retarded enough to run computationally intensive code written in Javascript on their web browsers."

    I don't really have a choice, I don't design the pages I use. Some pages have absolutely bloated quantities of Javascript. I don't know what the Google Play Developer Console does but the actual page completes almost instantly, then the CPU burns along for seconds (almost a minute on the phone) to just tell me how many people have my app and draw a couple little pie charts (I hope those are client-side, otherwise I REALLY don't know what it's doing.)

    "Who cares about 5ms time saved while page rendering, especially when it's a benchmark by Google themselves that says so. All browsers are already good enough."

    I take issue with that. If I wanted mediocrity I'd just run Windows. I want to use software where the developers worry about performance, and try to improve it all he time; not just "Oh, just buy a new computer every year or two and it's fine."

    Regarding the 16-bit color in Mobile Firefox -- 1) I must admit I'm surprised to read Firefox is doing this, and find it an odd decision. 2) I wonder how many phones have a 24-bit LCD? It used to be real common for them to be just 18-bit. These are supposed to dither so banding isn't noticeable though.

    1. Mark C Casey

      Re: Javascript and 16-bit color

      Thank you!

      It drives me up the wall every time I try to use Firefox on my mobile or Nexus only to come across some images or CSS shading and see the ugliness.

      For example, on the html5test website it has a bit of simple shading behind the test number. Here is what it looks like on Firefox (beta) and the latest Chrome on my Nexus 7.

      http://i.imgur.com/8GdtT.png - Firefox

      http://i.imgur.com/yGpcH.png - Chrome

  8. Adam Azarchs
    Meh

    What I'd like to see

    is more innovation on the html rendering front. For most of the pages I go to, much more time is spent rendering html than compiling/running javascript. I know chrome's javascript engine is important to Google's "reduce the OS to a device driver layer" strategy of taking over the world, but there is an awful lot of time spent drawing static content, and that is getting little or no attention.

    1. David 164

      Re: What I'd like to see

      I am surprise that Google have not yet produce there own HTML/CSS rendering engine, instead relying on Apples Webkit. May be Google will in the future build there own HTML/CSS engine and we will see speed improvement.

      1. Ben Liddicott

        Re: What I'd like to see

        You mean KHTML that Apple took that Google took afterwards.

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