After launching the a new tips panel on Fiddle Salad that shows on top of other dialog windows whenever a fiddle is opened, I found a decline in traffic. Specifically, page views decreased. Does that mean the tips were poorly done? To investigate, I compared the views in the past 30 days to the previous period and looked at the traffic for different pages. The top pages ranked by page view saw an increase in ratio compared to the rest. My hypothesis is that when opening a saved fiddle, users were deterred by the tip panel that opened. I found the data to back up the hypothesis.

The analysis is that there were 0 visitors to the pages in the past 30 days because they just didn’t bother to check off “Show tips on startup”. This made sense, as the tips panel often blocked pieces of code. My plan is to just show the tips panel once a day so that opening saved fiddles wouldn’t show it.

Update:
I found out that the new tab page in Chrome stable was changed, removing the apps. This would explain the decline in traffic on the CoffeeScript IDE page. This change has been there for 4 months on the Chrome beta channel that I use on Windows.

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.)

Recently, I switched from Google Chrome to Firefox. I don’t know why, but it may be a Japanese browser called Sleipnir that started this change. Two weeks ago, instead of studying for my midterms as I was already, I took 45 minutes off to try this little customizable browser called Sleipnir. Actually, while trying it, I was searching on Live for reviews and reading Wikipedia on Norse mythology behind Sleipnir. Slippy’s quite fun to use, and here’s a few things I liked:

1. one-click search any engine. Compared to firefox where if I search on W I have to select it from a drop down menu. In Chrome, I have to open a new tab. Both require 2 clicks before I get there. Sleipnir is the only browser I used recently (in more than 3 years) that doesn’t have the streamlined UI. It lays out all the buttons so that I have quick access to it. I can easily search Google, Live, Youtube, Wikipedia, and Answers in 5 clicks.
2. Completely customizable hotkeys. As a linux user, I really liked those little boxes called Lynx. It’s the fast and lightweight command line browser. Nothing beats it when I want to access my information fast. From launching it to loading a webpage, it is by far the fastest (and most comfortable, since I don’t have to switch any hand from the mouse to keyboard and it has the inherent advantage of the terminal). Using Sleipnir, it is possible to customize all your keys without a plugin. I used some key extension plugin for firefox and wasn’t too satisfied with it.
3. Light weight tabbing. Sleipnir uses the IE 6 interface (in Vista? Yes!) that just made it shine (literally with the glossy interface) with an extra quality. Like I said, this browser doesn’t try to copy the other ones on the market. It sticks to the classical and lets the user add the dynamic elements. So, how did IE 6 have tabbing? That’s where Sleipnir does better than IE 8 and Chrome. It doesn’t clog your browsing. Who wants to be offered to go back to a tab that was just closed when opening a new tab? Only browsers with no toolbars have to do that.

Now we come to a browsing paradigm that I’ve observed. The browser interface is divided into 2 parts:

• the webpage
• the UI

Chrome centers on the webpage but restricts the user’s freedom. After all, why give the users almost no customization options and forcing users to search google every time they type something in the address bar? Sleipnir sits on the other side, but not the extreme in my opinion. If your browser has so many configuration options, they should be easy to access and humanly understandable. Try typing about:config in firefox. (as a side joke, also try about:mozilla to see the reference to EU as the beast and Microsoft as the Golden Haired Boy).

I can’t resist showing it here. (Another side note: free software does get frequent rebirths. But I don’t like continuously upgrading my software! I’d rather upgrade individual applications in the Windows style when I want it and where I want it). But which is the best horse? Sleipnir in Norse mythology was often ridden to Hel, but don’t browsers act as the modern transportation tool to slip through the web? If so, there’s a best horse and one that is best suited for speed, comfort, and control (the special needs of the user). In this case, I will only focus on a single need of the user, that is to use his fast bandwidth in Firefox!

1. get flash block, but don’t restart yet. Flash leeches bandwidth
2. %AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\default.xxx\, where xxx is a random string of 3 characters.
3. add these to user.js (and save as all files in notepad)
   user_pref(“network.http.pipelining”, true);
   user_pref(“network.http.proxy.pipelining”, true);
   user_pref(“network.http.pipelining.maxrequests”, 8);
   user_pref(“content.notify.backoffcount”, 5);
   user_pref(“plugin.expose_full_path”, true);
   user_pref(“ui.submenuDelay”, 0);

   user_pref(“browser.xul.error_pages.enabled”, true);
   user_pref(“content.interrupt.parsing”, true);
   user_pref(“content.max.tokenizing.time”, 3000000);
   user_pref(“content.maxtextrun”, 8191);
   user_pref(“content.notify.interval”, 750000);
   user_pref(“content.notify.ontimer”, true);
   user_pref(“content.switch.threshold”, 750000);
   user_pref(“network.http.max-connections”, 32);
   user_pref(“network.http.max-connections-per-server”, 8);
   user_pref(“network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy”, 8);
   user_pref(“network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server”, 4);
   user_pref(“nglayout.initialpaint.delay”, 0);
   user_pref(“browser.cache.memory.capacity”, 65536);

4. That works for slow connections. For faster ones, try other settings on ths webpage.
5. Almost forgot. These settings require a restart of firefox.

Enjoy your surfing. I just don’t see why geeks like that browser called Chrome. There’s not much performance tweaks a geek could do maybe except turn off website checking and other options. Nothing compared to firefox. So I just have to conclude that Google just make their browser unique in its slim interface so that it looks like the most evolved of all browsers. Forget about extra processes since they end up chewing more memory and cpu. A few quick settings in firefox, and no browser can compete with it in terms of performance.