Freeciv As Benchmark of HTML5 Canvas Javascript Performance 246
Andreas(R) writes "The Freeciv.net crew has benchmarked their web client, which is a rich web application using the HTML5 canvas element. This shows how fast Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer perform using the latest HTML5 web standards."
Not fast (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Opera? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual (Score:5, Informative)
Clearly you didn't even read the article, just looked at numbers. IE should not have even been tested - it does not support HTML5 canvas elements! They worked around this using a bunch of really ugly hacks that completely destroyed the performance, but honestly they'd have been better off simply saying "it doesn't work, we'll wait until IE9, thanks for giving us Acid2 compatibility but you've got a long way to go!"
IE8 actually works pretty damn well for much of the modern web; it's far from the fastest but it's fast enough for most, it is compatible with CSS2 and the other standards most web developers still use, and it has fixed most of the issues that people have cursed at IE over for so long. However, it has very little support for new standards - its CSS3 is still limited, and as far as I know it supports no HTML5 at all. Compared to the rapid improvement of other browsers, the IE team had better be on their toes or they'll be left far behind in the dust.
Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual (Score:4, Informative)
Worth pointing out that HTML5 isn't a standard yet. It's still in draft for the next couple years.
Re:That's hardly a benchmark (Score:4, Informative)
QuakeLive doesn't run in the browser. It is just the Quake 3 engine wrapped into a browser plugin.
Re:Not fast (Score:2, Informative)
I'd assume it's not. I ran their benchmark with Chrome on Win 7 and my Sony laptop and got 43.8ms as the result which is quite a bit faster than they listed as their result.
I also got 149.72 with FF 3.6, which again is quite a bit faster.
Re:Not fast (Score:3, Informative)
Most people like to scroll around the map a bit while they're planning their turn . . .
Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual (Score:1, Informative)
And people who are tired of flash dominating the web, yet performing abysmally for video.
Re:bias (Score:5, Informative)
'Cause Vista's not as slow as people claim. I've never seen any evidence, either in my testing or online, that Vista ran programs any slower than XP. Most of Vista's slowness rep came from two things:
1) Lots of messing with the disk, particularly on boot. Vista wanted to cache a ton of shit in memory, probably to aggressively, as well as other stuff. Could lead to a system being sluggish to respond to users when it first started.
2) People running it on crap hardware. Vista has a much higher minimum bar than XP for good performance. You really want a dual core and 2GB minimum for a nice system (as opposed to a P4 and 1GB being fine for XP). Lots of people had older systems, tried the new OS, and got mad because it didn't work well. Duh. Newer software needs more resources.
So it doesn't surprise me that a pure app test worked fine on Vista. It was never slow at that.
Firefox 3.5 outperformed Firefox 3.0 (Score:5, Informative)
SuSE OpenLinux had an old 3.0.7 version of Firefox while Vista had a newer version.
Firefox 3.5 has a totally rewritten javascript engine from scratch. It uses some dynamic tree mathmatical aglorithms to perform operations many times faster and has support for javascript functions mapped in ram before execution. Vista used Firefox 3.5 while SuSE had Firefox 3.0.7 installed without the new javascript engine. Firefox 3.0.x was a ram hog compared to 3.5 too.
I also imagine Safari would execute on MacOSX much better than Windows since its designed for it. Itunes is kind of proof as it sucks on Windows.
Re:Graphics (Score:3, Informative)
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("slashdot.org") {
display: none !important;
}
}
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
In Excel, no less! (Score:4, Informative)
Space Invaders, Monopoly, ... oh my.
http://gamesexcel.com/games-excel-vba.html [gamesexcel.com]
Freeciv.ORG (Score:3, Informative)
The summary and the freeciv.net main page (I'm sure it's somewhere else but that's my point) doesn't mention this: it's based on freeciv.org [freeciv.org].
(also strange; the freeciv.org site only mention freeciv.net in their 'community news', not 'project news', so it really seems "distinct projects", they're not officially promoting the other option, yet?)
Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual (Score:3, Informative)
Firefox 3.0 doesn't support HTML5 either, but they've included that in the test, and it performs a lot better than IE8.
Firefox has supported <canvas> since 1.5 [mozilla.org], so it was perfectly fair to include 3.0.
Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual (Score:3, Informative)
Worth pointing out that HTML5 isn't a standard yet. It's still in draft for the next couple years.
Canvas is at last call at the WHATWG [whatwg.org]. Look at the little tags at the side: "Last call for comments". This means that the WHATWG (a standards organization) believes that part of the spec is stable and is asking for implementations.
Canvas is also a de facto standard. Gecko, WebKit, and Presto have all implemented it more or less interoperably for an awful long time now: Firefox since 2005, for instance.
You are correct to say that HTML5 is not yet a W3C standard, unless you call Working Drafts "standards". But the W3C is not the only standards body out there.