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."
That's hardly a benchmark (Score:3, Funny)
Now someone just needs to port the Quakes over, for a real benchmark. None of this turn-based strategy nonsense. :p
Re:That's hardly a benchmark (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, seeing as Freeciv runs at 7 or 8 fps on Chrome for them, I imagine Quake will run pretty phenomenally.
Re:That's hardly a benchmark (Score:5, Funny)
Make it 320 columns wide and 240 rows deep, for old-school flavor, with all cells empty, and just treat each cell's background color as a pixel value...
What could possibly go wrong?
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I saw it done in Excel once...
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here's conway's life in a fullscreen 20x20 table: http://etcet.net/projects/conway.html [etcet.net]
it gets about 2-3 fps on my atom box. 100x100 is about 10spf
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In Excel, no less! (Score:4, Informative)
Space Invaders, Monopoly, ... oh my.
http://gamesexcel.com/games-excel-vba.html [gamesexcel.com]
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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.
Drop IE8 (Score:2)
IE8 isn't the dominant IE browser yet. Drop IE8 support and offer the IE6/IE7 users a chance to go to another browser. If they have to get used to a new 'look' anyway, what's the difference between IE6->Chrome vs IE6->IE8?
Re:Drop IE8 (Score:4, Insightful)
To the gimlet-eyed corporate IT guy who controls the browser on 10,000 seats and DroneCorp Inc, LLC, on the other hand, it will pretty much come down to "Which one will allow me to break anything you might possibly do instead of your work just by clicking at group policy objects for a few minutes?" and "Which one will pull updates from WSUS?". This is why Chrome's marketshare is increasing at a fair clip; but the worker bees at DroneCorp Inc, LLC will be getting IE7 sometime in 2012...
Re:Drop IE8 (Score:4, Interesting)
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The main reason for IE6 is the combination of idiotic managers/developers that have locked a lot of applications into IE6 only.
Would you:
- pay 38 vendors between £20k and £3m each to migrate your old versions of their software to a new browser, or
- manually rewrite the UI of 60 systems, or
- keep the web browser that continues to work with 60 systems from 38 vendors, requires no new testing, no new hardware, no new licences and saves you a massive change overhead you just don't need
Having made that decision in a manner that achieves the best outcome for the customers, the owners of the business and the staff (in that ord
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It's the difference between ideal approach and pragmatic real-world approach.
Vendor A offers IE6 support only (back when it was IE6 or Netscape) and meets 90% of the requirements out of the box; Vendor B offers IE6 and Netscape support but only meets 60% of the requirements out of the box. Since nobody has Netscape installed it's a complete no-brainer to buy from Vendor A, even though you get browser lock-in as a result.
The entire point of web apps in a business environment isn't the ease of replacing the b
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Far easier is to run XP with IE6 in a virtual container on the desktop PC, providing support for the legacy estate while permitting new systems to be introduced using modern browsers.
Although less elegant, less secure and less fun than your approach it does have the advantage of being already possible and easy to roll out by a corporate IT department.
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What benefit is there to upgrading to IE7 over IE8? Did that much stuff really break between the two?
Complete standards like XHTML and SVG (Score:2)
Building to modern published (complete) standards is the only real way.
XHTML 1.0 and SVG 1.1 are "modern published (complete) standards", yet not even IE 8 supports them.
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Freeciv should probably be blocked at work anyway.
We used to have an old client/server installed in the office a few years ago. It was a fun game to login every hour or two and do a turn or two.
But these days, SmartFilter pretty much grabs everything that isn't work-related.
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I haven't seen an alternative browser that it works reliably on yet. Yes, its a windows specific thing, but until other browsers properly support single sign on you're not going to get them into the corporate workplace in any fully supported manner. And if they're not at work, they're less likely to end up getting installed at home, either.
I mean, i'm an admin and run plenty of different browsers, but from a "please why won't the users leave me alone
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Enabling NTLM in Firefox is URI specific. I haven't seen any issues with it though.
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NTLM/windows domain authentication - single sign-on.
Have your users run IE 8 (not 6) through an HTTP proxy that has access only to these sites, and have them run Chrome or Firefox for everything else.
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It will be by the end of the year, the new look isn't much different than IE7 as far as I've seen, and it comes with the most popular OS on the planet. Dropping support for IE8 is a most idiotic thing to do, regardless of how shitty it is.
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Um, don't most benchmarks put IE8 Javascript performance like, an order of magnitude better than IE 7, which is like an order of magnitude better than IE 6?
A better way is to get all IE users onto Chrome Frame to run this web application.
Not fast (Score:4, Informative)
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which would be dreadful even for a turn-based game.
Erm, wouldn't a turn based game only need to refresh once per turn?
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Most people like to scroll around the map a bit while they're planning their turn . . .
Re:Not fast (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the data updates once per turn. Things like animations (not sure that freeciv uses any) and moving the map around for a different view can happen many times in the interium, and of course as you send it all the commands each turn for what to do, loading UI displays and such, all of that is running at 8fps too.
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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.
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only eight frames per second
And this, kids, is why we don't run applications inside of web browsers.
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only eight frames per second
And this, kids, is why we don't run applications inside of web browsers.
... yet. Besides, you seem to be equating games with apps - there would be a lot of non-game apps that would happily run at 8fps. Graphing or spreadsheet apps don't need killer refresh rates and even something with more animation like powerpoint wouldn't look horrible (well, no more so than the actual product) at that rate. If anything, business apps are likely to drive a more widespread adoption of HTML5-based browsers in corporate environments, which will in turn allow more effort to be devoted to pushing
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Meh. We run lots of things in slow ways. Remember all of those games you used to play that took 100% of your computer or console's power? Now I run them in something that emulates the entire system. Oh, and they run faster than they did back then too.
I ran Civilisation on a 16MHz 386SX. An x86 emulator written in JavaScript running in a browser on a modern PC will get better performance than that. FreeCiv is a bit more processor-intensive than the original Civilisation, but it can probably handle ren
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"And yet, the NeXT systems had a reputation for beautiful graphics."
Sure. Both users agreed.
Re:Not fast (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not fast (Score:5, Interesting)
And I believe the trend will be for consumer CPUs to aim for lower heat and power, rather than higher speed. Unfortunately, the abstraction layers just keep piling on there.
Give it another few years, and we might not be able to emulate Commodore 64 games on the desktop any more.
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Unfortunately, the abstraction layers just keep piling on there.
Well, to be fair, they're just re-writing software the way it should have been done in the first place, but couldn't originally due to the hardware's limited capabilities.
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Obligatory thedailywtf.com link: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Inner-Platform_Effect.aspx [thedailywtf.com]
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In case anyone was wondering... (Score:4, Funny)
Safari on Snow Leopard? (Score:2, Insightful)
bias (Score:2)
Seriously though, any idea why Chrome is faster on Vista, the most maligned, stereotyped as slow OS there has ever been? Would also be keen to see OS X results.
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.
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On my laptop I have noticed a huge performance increase with Ubuntu compared to Vista running netbeans, open office, and Firefox. You are right its mostly disk. However disk access is the number one bottleneck on modern pcs so that is very important.
The problem is Windows loves to load a million services at once and the disk can only handle so much when it boots.
You should try running your win32 apps on Windows7 with the same hardware as vista? You will notice quite a difference. Also the slower processors
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My post was more taking the piss at the /. majority who rant on how shit vista is, and how "it is year of the linux desktop!", only to have it outperform Linux on tests like this.
Yes, its only 0.002ms or whatever, but it steal beat linux on that test :D
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It's also possible that Chrome is optimised for Windows as that's the majority share OS - it's where all their benchmarking is going to show up in the marketing metrics for how Chrome is so much faster than everyone else. They likely didn't spend so much time optimising the Linux port because it only had to be fit for purpose.
On a side note, Vista takes almost three minutes to boot to a usable state on my intel core 2 quad core q6600 (overclocked), 4GB desktop PC with a moderate amount of software installed
Coherence? (Score:4, Insightful)
Amusing so Vista is as good as XP for running programs but it need much more powerful hardware(!).
Don't you see a "small" contradiction/incoherence in your post?
Re:Coherence? (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it's a question of scalability, which is often more important than raw speed. With some systems, they perform well in relatively restricted hardware, but the performance improvement when you add more does not scale linearly with the extra RAM, CPU, and so on. With others, you get more constant overhead, but better scalability. Think of the overall performance as constant overhead + scalability load * resources. With XP, it sounds like the constant overhead is lower (which makes sense, as it had to run on 200MHz chips), but the scalability load is higher (which also makes sense, because it wasn't designed for 4+ cores and 2+GB of RAM).
Or, to put it another way, if XP gets 80% of the maximum theoretical performance out of a 200MHz Pentium with 128MB of RAM, but only 50% of the maximum theoretical performance from a 2GHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM, while Vista gets 50% and 70%, respectively, what the grandparent said would be true and contain no contradictions.
Various things in modern operating systems are optimised to take advantage of lots of spare RAM (for example, aggressive pre-fetching of data from the disk). Splitting services up into concurrent tasks has more overhead from context switching, but lets you scale better to multiple processors. Older desktop operating systems treated RAM as a very scarce resource and were heavily optimised for the single-CPU case, because hardly anyone had more than one CPU.
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Windows 7 needs more resources than Vista? Duh.
Look, Vista was a festering pile of diseased dogshit. You know it, I know it, Microsoft knows it. There's simply no need to defend it, especially when the "defence" runs to "Well, if you run it on monster hardware, it's not as slow as you think."
The nightmare is over, man. Just let it go.
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Newer software needs more resources if it offers more functionality or it is badly written, and I don't see more functionality in Vista/Win7...
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In my experience Win7 seems to require fewer resources than Vista - I can't ever imagine Vista on a netbook, but 7 does a nice enough job, and you might not consider all that graphical "bling" to be functionality but it has an overhead (and the Win7 implementation is much better than Vista's was).
I'll let Penny Arcade sum up my Win7 experience [penny-arcade.com] to date.
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One of the biggest reasons in the apparent jump in performance from Vista to Win7 was MS fixing the ungodly GDI problem that Vista had - there's a fairly thorough write-up about it here http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/04/25/engineering-windows-7-for-graphics-performance.aspx [msdn.com]
Essentially, GDI in Vista scaled in a square/cube fashion with each new object taking up memory in both system and graphics memory - a double whammy for any machine with integrated graphics which hammered the memory bus and, if you
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The main problem is the memory floor before you actually run anything is far too close to the memory ceiling that can be addressed by 32bit Vista (some other MS 32 bit systems don't have that problem - eg. some versions of MS Server2003). That means that a machine with the maximum memory that 32bit Vista can support is still horribly slow in a lot of circumstances and there is no way to fix it while keeping
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.
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Some browsers (such as Opera) do not have 64-bit versions for the Windows platform. This is to be expected for many reasons, such as (a) browsers do fine with the amount of memory that a 32-bit process has access to (b) 32-bit plugins can't be loaded into 64-bit processes (c) any sort of javascript compiler (IE doesnt have one, but..) would require both a 32-bit and 64-bit codegen due to th
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x64 IE doesn't support 32-bit plugins, which is normal for x64 browsers. The reason Windows Update doesn't work in it is that Microsoft hasn't gotten around to making an x64 version of the Windows Update Plugin. There are almost no x64 plugins (e.g. Flash) so x64 IE isn't terribly useful.
Still, the OP had an excellent question, and someone should check it out (assuming the test doesn't require a plugin).
Slow vs. Old (Score:2)
No Mac benchmarks (Score:2)
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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?)
How many decades late? (Score:2)
...using the latest HTML5 web standards
Amazing how long it's taken to get a freakin' frame buffer.
Cue a zillion Web 3.0 marketeers about how the web browser is the OS of the future. Oh, and the iPad is really keen-o, too.
Sl-sl-sl-slashvertisement! (Score:2)
That being said, it's FreeCiv! Of course I signed up.
FreeCiv vs Civ4 (Score:3, Interesting)
I started playing Civ4 last week for a couple of games -- it runs very well in Wine, incidently -- and I'm wondering how FreeCiv compares. Obviously the graphics aren't there, but after a couple of games that seems less and less important. The gameplay mechanics are what matters, and I think they work very very well in Civ4. And is the AI any good? Wikipedia seems to imply that diplomacy is a bit simple.
Anybody got "in-depth" experience with both games?
Re:Opera? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Opera? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Opera? (Score:4, Interesting)
A year ago I experimented with HTML5, and made (you guessed it) a Tetris clone, which took advantage of Canvas elements.
I noted that when drawing entire images, it was all very fast. Drawing a frame took about 12ms in Firefox and Opera. (limited by the precision of the timer)
Then I tried combining all the images into one, and drawing a region from the tileset. Talk about slowdown! Wow! Separate 64x64 images blitted fast, but as soon as it was dealing with a 512x512 image, the time to render jumped to about 500ms.
I did some quick pixel math and concluded both Opera and Firefox must've been making a copy of the entire tileset every time I tried to blit a region from it. It's the only thing that added up. When I boosted the size to 1024x1024, it jumped to over 2000ms for a frame. Completely ridiculous! ;)
Perhaps someone else could chime in about whether this bug has been fixed? Note: I was blitting from Image elements to Canvas elements. Canvas to Canvas always worked fine for me.
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I'd expect them to help out.
It is kind of bad for pr when performance test of all popular browsers do not include yours because it won't run in it (and in it alone)...
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Cowboyneal has worked out a system to automatically transfer all 2 posts where they belong.
Or someone sold out.
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... all posts less than 2...
come on slashcode !
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.
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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 "standard
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IE8 is sure not slow for most web browsing. I messed with it recently before deciding to go back to Firefox and it displays normal web pages noticeably faster. In either case we are talking like a second or less, but still. Most websites out there, IE8 was enough of an improvement I noted it.
Now obviously that wasn't enough for me to switch, but you are right that the "Oh it is so slow!" crap is disingenuous. IE8 doesn't have support for the new standards, but what it does support it seems to be pretty zipp
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um no it's not. I have to use IE 8 every day and it is slow. The kind of click to open in a new tab walk take a sip of coffee and and then I can use the computer again slow. It's page rendering isn't bad but that is offset with browser lock ups when trying to open more than one tab at a time. In safari, firefox, and even chrome, I can read one webpage and open up a bunch of tabs from it. in IE8 loading one tab in the background is enough to halt the whole computer interface for a couple of seconds. It
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For instance, the Sun Java SSV Helper plugin for IE tends to cause a lot of the problems that you are describing including taking 3-4 seconds to open new tabs at times. I have no idea exactly what the Java SSV Helper plugin does but I have yet to encounter a Java applet that won't run without it
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Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual (Score:5, Interesting)
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Sounds like a major step up. I hadn't actually seen any info on IE9, but if you say it's released publicly I'll take a look. Better JavaScript will definitely be very nice, as would SVG, but I do hope that canvas, at least, is supported too.
Any idea when a beta will be available, for MSDN subscribers or otherwise?
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IE should not have even been tested - it does not support HTML5 canvas elements!
Indeed it doesn't. A lot of the hacks involved to get IE to support canvas is merely an emulation of canvas [google.com] using VML [wikipedia.org].
I've experimented with a bunch of sprite based animation stuff on canvas, and have seen similarly terribly poor results on a bunch of versions of IE using the code google wrote. (I'm assuming their benchmark is regarding the rendering sequence) Might as well create <image> tags, and animate the image tags with some style manipulation using js, because functionally what the hacks are d
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Man, I should have read the article. FTFA:
Note that the implementation for Internet Explorer 8 does not use the HTML5 canvas element, because this isn't supported. Freeciv.net implements a canvas-replacement using DHTML and divs with clipped background-images. Therefore the test results are not directly comparable with the other web browsers.
That's what I get for not reading the article :-(
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I think the IE management is still living in 2005 with their 95% market share and want to leave HTML5 in the dust.
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No, they're living in 2010 with a 60% market share.
Unless HTML5 outperforms Flash it's not likely to be the reason for anybody to switch. Anybody who hates MS or Flash has already switched, right?
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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.
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you can see them implementing some HTML 5 functionality as a contest of whom piss the further. But I prefer to see it as a testbed of HTML 5, seeing what work and what doesn't to improve the actual draft of the HTML 5 spec. A lot of the spec in HTML 5 are in because of the implementation done by Mozilla, Opera and Chrome of these specs.
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Quick and dirty paste of the results, for the lazy:
Web Browser | Operating System | Average Rendering Time| Frames / Second
Google Chrome 4.0.249.78 (36714) | Windows Vista | 126ms | 7,9 fps
Google Chrome 4.0.249.30 | OpenSuSE Linux | 128ms | 7,8 fps
Safari 4.0.4 | Windows Vista | 222ms | 4,5 fps
Firefox 3.7a
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I couldn't find a control specifically for them, but I did discover that turning on Help & Preferences > Layout > Use Classic Index seemed to kill them without too much impact.
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@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("slashdot.org") {
display: none !important;
}
}
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I'm still a bit pissed-off that such a change would be made, unannounced, to people like me that actually pay for their services. This is a bit angrifying.
Why? The buttons are small, not particularly intrusive, and useful for people that use those services -- and as they're very popular, that's a lot of people.
If you don't use FB/twitter, or don't want to link to slashdot stories from there, then don't click the buttons.
Yeesh...
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(I haven't look at my yahoo home page in a year or two, though, so maybe they eventually fixed that.)
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Well shit.. don't that beat all.
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I've been using Lite Mode for years and years. This stuff never bothers me and it's reading /. the way god intended.
-l