Bits, Bytes, Food and Fun

When you talk about browser benchmarks a lot of people refer to sites like Sunspider, but these only test raw performance with micro benchmarks, which can show major differences between browser speeds BUT they are very bad at showing real life browser usage.

A friend recently showed me a better set of benchmarks, called Peacekeeper. These tests try to emulate real world usage, and they show a very different picture.

Peacekeeper Scores (Higher is better, All run on Windows 7 RC on the same machine)

IE8 = 422

Firefox 3.0.10 = 688

Chrome 2.0 = 1207

Safari 4.0 = 1423

This shows that Safari 4 is only 3.5 times faster than IE8. This is dramatically different, from Sunspider which shows Safari 4 to be 37x faster. The difference between Firefox 3.0 and IE8 is even less. Firefox 3.0 is only 50% faster than IE8.

Now all of this still probably only milliseconds worth of differences between browsers and a browser is much more than its performance, for example i think IE8’s RSS manager is a lot better than Safari 4’s, then there’s the UI to consider, and most importantly how long it takes to start the browser.

I installed Windows 7 7229 today on my netbook, its fast, i mean very fast for my netbook(1.2ghz, Hp 2133). 

1. The installer was a lot faster, no waiting for it to load(this used to take 10minutes alone now <1minute).

2. <40 second boot.

3. 10 second shutdown

4. 5GB HDD space used (not including page file / hibernation disabled). 

This build also gets a working Graphics driver off Windows Update, that allows Sleep, Aero, and Windows Performance tools to work (previous drivers blocked Sleep mode)

I can’t say i have noticed any differences, everything seems to be working the same.

Good work the wordpress Team

Introducing RedKite, a small, fast, powerful, elegant Twitter Client, that aims to take the best of other twitter clients and roll it all into one.

It is hosted on Codeplex here. It might be a while before there is any real progress as i have exams for the next two weeks but after than i expect things to speed up a lot.

I am now using Live Writer as it has far superior grammar and spell checking than the built in one for word press. Which is really important, as I’m crap at them.

Coming soon why i use IE.