I came up with the idea to make a program for divining crow cries from jcrow’s. With slight modifications over time, it has come second to the original source of information.

I often get an unbootable Linux system and not remember which file I edited or whatever else I did. In this situation, I hit Alt-F2 to switch to the second console (the first one is used to output boot information). Then here’s what I do at the terminal

Unfortunately, that’s not what happened this time. Xorg had problems starting, and I couldn’t issue keyboard commands. Next, I booted into Windows to finish up my tasks. See, I made a shared NTFS partition that is mounted by every OS I boot. In Linux, I create a symlink in the home folder called Documents, somewhat like 7’s Documents library folder. Now on the weekend, I finally get a chance to see what’s up with the Debian system. A piece of wisdom (wit won’t really help) applies here,

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
– Albert Einstein

I simply used the reparation kernel boot parameters and switched to a terminal using Alt+F2. Now I’m in the driver’s seat again.

I immediately ran that command, as I remembered a message about it last time I used apt-get. Apparently, Entrance, e17’s login manager, couldn’t start without some configuration files removed by apt-get purge. The autoremove command does dependency checking for programs that are not used in the tree anymore. It also uninstalls them, so they are no longer loaded via symlink by the login manager.

That was it. Problems in Linux are often as quick and easy to fix as it was created.

Recent comparisons of browsers focus on JavaScript speed. There are many ways to measure browser performance, including image load time, reloading from cache, start time, and css rendering speed. While Opera was in the lead a few years ago, it has been branded as the fastest browser again.

You should notice the ad on the left for Chrome. So which one is the fastest? I ran the tests on Linux and Windows.

Benchmark Method

There’s nothing special about using JavaScript to detect when onload is fired by the browser, as long as the browser follows the convention that it is fired after the page is loaded. This used to be an issue I noted to the point of just using Firefox and ignoring other browsers. According to this article, it was fixed 2 years ago. So I took the benchmark from the site and ran it. Not surprisingly, Firefox came out highest on the score. Actually, that’s a negative score. Ideally, the page takes no time to load.

Linux

Google Chrome for Linux is different from the one for Windows, as the benchmark would load the first site for the first time, but could not time it nor reload it. Opera got stuck on MySpace once and kept adding more elements to the page, possibly due to an ad that is not usually loaded locally. I ran these tests on Sabayon Linux with kernel 2.6.30 (I expect 2.6.33 to be faster, since it has been patched with Con Koliva’s kernel enhancements). An interesting note here, not seen in other parts of the result set, is that Arora took longer to load pages on the first time, but was faster on all subsequent reloads. The total score for Arora comes second to Opera. On another note, Firefox with the same extensions, ran faster on Linux than Windows.

Windows

Not surprisingly, the winners on Windows were 32 bit browsers. Aside from the small speed increase due to smaller pointer sizes in 32 bit applications, I think Opera and Chrome are faster browsers, as they advertise. A surprising result is that 64 bit IE ran faster than 64 bit Firefox. I noticed that a while ago, but decided to stick with Firefox because it has add-ons. Iron is a stripped down version of Chrome compiled from source. It should be slightly faster, with the slimmer binary and no personal tracking features. I ran this on Windows 7 Pro 64 bit Version 6.1 (Build 7600).

Conclusion

Opera beat all other browsers, just with its default settings. A little more tuning of redraw rate and memory use could improve the score. I expect the real results when browsing to deviate. Chrome and Firefox has DNS prefetching, Firefox and Opera have pipelining. To improve that DNS fetch speed in Opera, you can set your system to use OpenDNS to resolve domain names.

After the Benchmark (you should decide which browser to use)

I measured the memory use!

It looks Chrome and IE were designed for really cheap laptops. (They can’t run on old computers with Windows 2000.)

I noticed that the icons for search jump had different sizes when I loaded it in Google Chrome.

When I investigated the issue, I found the icons had 16×16, 32×32, 64×64 image sizes embedded. Chrome happened to load the larger image sizes.

The final trick was to get Chrome to reload it. I tried restarting the browser and clearing the cache. It finally worked when I uninstalled it from the extensions menu and reinstalled it from the web site.

Minimal SearchJump is available for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera.