While wrapping up the Fiddle Salad project and doing cross browser testing, I found that Firefox wouldn’t run my project, at least on a local host.

This was one of the reasons I couldn’t get a stable release all in one shot. I initially thought it was caused by the IP address or the port number, but others report it’s just a problem with not having a domain. So one way is to add a domain mydomain.com in the Windows host file in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc.

The changes are applied immediately after saving, and I’m able to run the site locally in Firefox.

Another way is to use one of the Worker polyfills that bypasses the Firefox security checks. I suggest fakeworker, but in my case I would need to rewrite some code to be compatible with the old API to use it. Of course, this was only one of the many problems I found on the uploaded version, so I had to prioritize which problems to fix first. It’s always better to go for the efficiency gains at the start and visible results at the end. So I made a Django media sync javascript debug processor for future debug purposes on the production site.

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.

Now you will notice that the icons load a lot faster and all at the same time if you are using either the minimal version or the plain version.

Note: the new version has a new namespace, so the old version must be uninstalled manually from Greasemonkey

• instead of clicking twice, the panel hides itself after a single click.
• by default, the script is only active on Google
• an icon has been added for Clusty
• the event listener for toggling the panel is only applied to the hide link
• visual aspects are more balanced

Before

After

Download it here.

SearchJump has been updated with new link for bing. You can download it for Greasemonkey.

I’ve been using Windows 7 since May, when I started my first co-op term. It was definitely better than Vista and much better than XP in some ways. The only thing I don’t like about Windows 7 compared to XP is more hard drive grinding pre-loading programs before they are used into memory.

So this time I decided to install Kubuntu again, forgetting what caused me to abandon it last time. (I couldn’t recall the reason until I finished writing that last sentence) Just a quick overview of what whas karmic and the fox before I get into the root cause of this.

Karma is evolutionary garbage, literally. Some companies trying to make monkey dress it up and call it “good karma” or try to sell you “karma coins”. All garbage. I remember the story behind the game Alpha Centauri. There was only 1 in a million chance of the spaceship getting hit by a meteor, yet due to the karma carried by humans onboard, it was destined to be hit by a meteor. Same thing happens in real life. Things on an outer level never change without a change on an inner level.

So why is Kubuntu karmic? It still had the same problems from last time. When I loaded up my wireless card, I still had to apply the bug fix from Hardy, back 2 generations ago over a year. I expected it to be fixed by now. Second, the default firefox version from the repository was version 3.0.6. If Ubuntu updated its software every six months, then it should at least be 3.5 now. Karmic was released at the end of October. I go through several links on google to install 3.5. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the only bug I encountered installing firefox. There was a firefox installer included with Kubuntu. If I click on it, the installer exits saying firefox is already the latest version. As a result, I had to install it from the command line. After the installation finished, it gave an error message about kde. This should have been a clue about what would follow. Firefox ran smooth until I tried to restore a few things using Firefox Extension Backup Extension (FEBE). I was only able to restore 3 things until the dialog box just refused to show up (it was a GNOME dialog box). After that, I saw KDE desktop crash a few times, apt unable to resolve dependencies, wireless stop working, and several attempts to get wireless back (it’s a lot harder without an internet connection). NOW the Karma becomes obvious, though I still don’t know why.

So now we come to the fox chasing its tail. That’s what you get with a distribution that aims to be current built on top of Debian Linux. The fox will never escape its tail. Kubuntu is based on the KDE desktop, and many Ubuntu users won’t even care to try it for whatever reason (maybe for the same reson they’ve never tried other distributions). When I compare the Kubuntu/Ubuntu website with the Sabayon/Gentoo websites, I find that the Ubuntu side has far less activity and takes longer to solve problems. All because the distribution is based on Debian. In a source based distribution like Gentoo, there is a much greater flow of knowledge. Just look at Planet Gentoo, a Gentoo user blog. It’s not surprising that I remember the reason I abandoned Kubuntu last time, as my laptop is installing Sabayon and I’m writing this. Kubuntu didn’t have a community, it didn’t have people contributin knowledge. It’s just a buggy KDE desktop on top of Xorg and the rest of Ubuntu.

Update: I’ve come across another article mentioning the same problem with Ubuntu (I did get the Kubuntu broken Grub bug, forcing me to install another Linux distro). Also, there is a more technical article benchmarking Gentoo and Ubuntu. Gentoo won, of course. As far as speed goes, Gentoo is the fastest, followed by Fedora, Slackware, Mandriva, and almost last . . . Ubuntu (last goes to the outdated Debian stable).

As far as searchme goes, it now redirects to google. It did a better job of showing search result previews than GooglePreview.

Because accessing any file in a directory containing 100+ files in a folder 8 levels deep C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\default. \Cache\ is going to be slow, moving the cache folder to C:\Cache would make it a lot faster.

1. navigate to about:cache to check out your current cache usage and directory
2. navigate to about:config
3. create a new string browser.cache.disk.parent_directory
4. a value of C:\ (preferably a separate partition) would put the cache directory at closest to the root