

Chrome 7 Will Get 60 Times Faster - twymer
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/205550/chrome_7_will_get_60_times_faster_google_says.html

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bd
Please ignore the bad reporting / marketing spin and focus on what actually
Chrome team did. The change _is_ significant and important.

It doesn't really matter that your current web applications will have more or
less the same speed. Removing a _huge_ performance bottleneck [1] paves a way
for completely new type of applications, so far unheard of on the web (way
beyond what's possible with Flash [2]).

And other browsers will follow, Firefox already has its own solution on the
way.

Trust me, this is _big_ news, though the effects will be felt only in some
time. Developers have to catch up. Even "oldfashioned" unaccelerated 2d canvas
is still very far from reaching its full potential.

\-------

[1] This bottleneck was coming mainly from compositing of classical software
rendered web content and new hardware accelerated content. New way is to do
everything HW accelerated (that's BTW why fonts look bit off in new Chrome and
Firefox).

[2] Just wait till WebGL will be enabled by default in upcoming Firefox 4 and
Chrome 7. There is a marked difference in capabilities, shaders are crazy
powerful.

~~~
xal
This is right on the money. People will be blown away by what google maps will
look like after enough browsers have WebGL capabilities and the maps team
switches to that technology instead of the crude javascript tiling that they
rely on right now.

~~~
rbranson
Unfortunately the companies that they (Bing, Yahoo, Google, etc) buy the map
data from would be very much against pushing their precious vector data out
into the public. All of the licensing is setup and specifically deals with
tiling maps. It will take years and years before the lawyers agree to it and
figure out the licensing details. Perhaps Google can circumvent this in the US
because they own their US data, but what about the rest of the world?

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lukev
The people who are complaining that this speedup only applies to 2D canvas are
missing the point.

HTML rendering itself is already "fast enough." All of the perceptible delay
when loading a webpage is network latency, rendering is already pretty much
instantaneous on all modern browsers.

What browsers _can't_ do right now is enable webapps with native speed and
experience. And that is what Google is targeting squarely, with this in
combination with Native Client.

If HTML5 is ever going to be a real Flash replacement, it's advances like
these that will make it happen.

~~~
ars
What about the delay when loading a humongous table?

I occasionally need to load a page with 10,000 (or more) table cells, and
those are always slow, and no one seems to test browser speeds on those.

~~~
lukev
We just addressed this problem at work.

The answer was to provide better tools that allowed users to analyze/interact
with the data _without_ having to render 10k rows to the screen.

It's not like they were able to read them all anyway. I'm going to go out on a
limb and say unilaterally that anything that's just dumping 10,000 rows to the
screen has, a priori, terrible usability.

It's not really a case I feel browser designers ought to spend a lot of time
optimizing for.

~~~
ars
That's true, but there wasn't time (i.e. money) to design something better.

It started much much much smaller, but they used it so much it grew far beyond
it's initial design, and we were never able to come back to it to do something
better. (It's an internal tool BTW, so we, i.e. they, just dealt with it.)

------
meric
"Chrome has traditionally been considered the browser to beat when it comes to
speed."

Traditionally? It was first released on windows only 2 years ago...

~~~
niyazpk
Traditional journalism.

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pbhogan
... at what?

Page rendering? Javascript? Download speeds? What?

I'm sure folks struggling with dial up modems will LOVE to hear web pages will
now load 60x faster. </sarcasm>

~~~
sushi
RTFA

 _that new GPU acceleration advances in the upcoming version 7 are achieving
speeds 60 times faster than in version 6_

~~~
mrduncan
That still doesn't explain _what_ is faster, only _how_ it's faster.

Based on the GPU acceleration bit, I'd assume it's page rendering though.

~~~
pixelbath
"rapid advances in Chrome's 2D graphics performance"

I'd assume it's the 2D graphics performance.

~~~
_delirium
A very specific subset of 2d graphics performance it seems: 2d animation using
certain kinds of transforms. Rendering large/complex SVGs isn't getting 60x
faster.

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corysama
It's true that this won't make Javascript or HTTP any faster, but it's still
very exciting to me. This is about making Canvas faster. That's great because
nearly all of the canvas games/demos have been spending around 90% of their
cycles waiting on Canvas and only 10% in Javascript. As great as Canvas is, so
far it has only been able to replicate games from the era of the 2Mhz SNES.
With this change, we may be able to reach the 30Mhz PlayStation 1 era (only 15
years behind the curve!).

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js2
This is the source for the article
[http://blog.chromium.org/2010/09/unleashing-gpu-
acceleration...](http://blog.chromium.org/2010/09/unleashing-gpu-acceleration-
on-web.html) where you can see that the 60x increase is in two specific 2D
canvas demos.

~~~
ggruschow
_From the blog post:_

    
    
      These early numbers show up to 60x speed improvement 
      over the current version of Google Chrome.
    

Hm... I don't need my browser to be 60x faster if it can't figure out that
(60/1) < (35/.5).

~~~
Groxx
Works for me in Chrome:

    
    
      javascript:alert(((60/1) < (35/.5)) ? "true" : "false"); // "true"
    

Or am I missing something more meta?

~~~
mbrubeck
I think the point is that "up to 60x" in the Chromium Blog post should have
been "up to 70x" or "over 60x in some cases." (But actually this depends on
how the 0.5 number was rounded...)

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moserware
It's nice to see Browser Wars 3.0 having benefits for the whole community.

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olegkikin
Most likely, not in JS execution. Probably rendering and 3D stuff.

It would be cool if it naively supported GPU calculations. (Which is available
for Firefox via jetpack: <http://groups.google.com/group/jetpack-to-
cuda/?pli=1>)

~~~
carlos
As rendering will get much faster, I guess we can consider JS will much faster
too, at least when using canvas with JS, which I believe it's the most
important bottleneck right now.

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ludwigvan
Do browsers have their own version of Moore's law? They seem to be the most
accelerating pieces of software.

~~~
alphabeat
Competition is fantastic for consumers.

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earcar
Since this is a rendering improvement, I hope this will be merged back or
developed directly into the original WebKit, so everyone can benefit.

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sandGorgon
My question is - does GPU mean nvidia/ATI, or will the Intel Integrated
graphics also be leveraged for these performance boosts ?

~~~
jrockway
It's OpenGL, right? On Linux, anyway, Intel GPUs do hardware acceleration.

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keyle
There still needs to be proper architecture for web based application.

I mean for example, data binding that works would be a plus. Anyone know how
to do this today, without being locked down into bad frameworks?

That's when we will start seeing some real improvements in web app
development.

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malkia
I have a simple question:

How would this acceleration work with Windows Remote Desktop? It would work
with VNC as it grabs the whole screen, but RDC replaces the video driver and
it stops being accelerated.

~~~
mullr
Newer versions of remote desktop know how to pass through some hardware
accelerated things, if you have Vista+ on both ends. Or so I've read. I don't
know at what layer that mechanism applies though. It may be direct3d calls, or
it may be hooking into the application layer to work with WPF.

~~~
malkia
We are on Vista, and we have problems with D3D. Another problem, even without
RDC is the security that IT put to log off the machine if it's not used for 15
minutes. That's okay, but certain D3D applications would lose the device, and
would not restore it correctly.

(That to be said, it's just way easier to write the said applications without
thinking of recovering from D3D LOST DEVICE. It's real pain in the ass to get
this working, especially if you have to put 1GB of vertex buffer/images data
in memory, and expect to be there).

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Groxx
WANT.

This is a very happy day :) It's the single largest thing I've been waiting
for for canvas.

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snissn
...if you have a GPU in your netbook

~~~
nkassis
They have a mechanism to detect if it's present or not. For example, some
cards don't have OpenGL drivers so they created ANGLE to fix that. They also
have software rendering which can be reenabled if needed.

~~~
snissn
sorry, the unstated and unrealized premise of my reply was that this is good
and great, but that there are also legacy issues of what technology people
actually will use the web browser on.

ChromeOS for example may mostly be on netbooks without GPUs.

However, at the same token this might be a good catalyst for even cell phones
and netbooks to have them, as the iPad seems to [quick google search] so
ultimately GPU may be the killer stat on mobile, although it probably is
already ,i'm just a rambling software dev

~~~
jrockway
Netbooks have GPUs. The Intel GPU is probably most common and least
performant, but it can still accelerate OpenGL to faster-than-software speeds.
And, new netbooks are shipping with nVidia Ion, which is quite fast. (I can
play 1080p h.264 on my nettop with an Ion GPU.)

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stretchwithme
sounds great. Now I can continue to get away with 700 open tabs at once.

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natmaster
Wouldn't this still put chrome behind ie9 and Firefox 4? Chrome's rendering
perf has been traditionally terrible.

This article is very misleading - acting like Chrome's been ahead of rendering
perf this entire time when it is in fact been in last place.

