iStockphoto's Kelly Thompson
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)Google's Gears technology may not have caught on widely in the world of Web programming, but operators of the iStockphoto photo sales site have become believers.
Among other things, Gears enables browsers to store data on a local computer, which most notably means that Web applications can be adapted to work even while offline. But for iStockphoto's purposes, it primarily means better performance for people using the site and secondarily lower operating costs for the Getty Images photo sales subsidiary.
"We're not requiring anyone to install Google Gears," the company said on an explanatory Web site. "If you do install Google Gears, though, iStock will work much faster."
Google launched the open-source Gears software in 2007, but so far, the sites that use it--among them Gmail, Google Reader, WordPress, and MySpace--are the exception rather than the rule.
Speed and money
The main motivation for the change was getting a faster site, which benefits iStockphoto's financial results, said Kelly Thompson, iStockphoto's chief operating officer.
"It was 95 percent performance and end-user experience, but let's face it: if I can get more pictures pumped out faster, with more searches, we sell more," Thompson said. "Cutting down a page load time for a user is more valuable to me than the money I'll save on bandwidth."
The company adopted Gears with no prompting from Google, he added. "We did this on our own," with Web programmers jumping on the project because "it's sexy for them to work on it."
iStockphoto activated its Gears support September 30, Thompson said. In the first 16 days of use, Gears saved the company from paying for the transfer of 132GB of data over the network and lightened its Web servers by 8.7 million communication requests--and that's with only 19,000 Gears-installed users, a "tiny portion of our traffic," he said. Those without Gears benefit, too, since iStock's Web servers are unburdened somewhat by those who do use it.
The technology works by locally storing various Web page ingredients--photo thumbnails, JavaScript program code, Cascading Style Sheet formatting files, for example. Older files are flushed periodically so the users' hard drives don't get too cluttered.
"It's a pretty basic implementation right now: the second time a user sees any image or requests a JavaScript file, it loads instantly," Thompson said. One of his developers described it as "the opposite of a drug dealer: the first hit isn't free, (but) every subsequent hit is."
Google is trying to propagate Gears, which is available as a browser plug-in. In a more aggressive move, it built Gears into its Chrome browser. And in the longer term, the HTML5 standard under development reproduces the local storage abilities of Gears, a move that stands to spread the technology more widely.
HTML5 good, IE 6 bad
Thompson is a fan of another HTML5 technology: built-in video. iStock licenses video content, as well as photos and other content, and currently streams it with Adobe Systems' Flash technology.
"We'd love to be able to ditch Flash on the video side, but it's probably a ways out," Thompson said, citing widespread use of Internet Explorer.
IE is widely loathed among Web developers for its slow performance and lack of standards compliance, and even Microsoft wishes that people would upgrade from IE 6, but it's still the single most widely used browser out there, even though Microsoft released it in 2001, just before Windows XP arrived. Microsoft released IE 7 in 2006, and it tried to improve standards compliance and security with the release of IE 8 this March.
People are gradually shifting away from IE 6, but not fast enough for Thompson's taste--or plans.
"We announced we'd drop official support for IE 6 in 2010 back at the beginning of the year. I'm not sure we're going to be able to it: the percentage of users is dropping--just not quite fast enough," he said.
From August (top) to September (below), Internet Explorer lost a bit of usage share, compared with rival browsers.
(Credit: Net Applications)According to Net Applications statistics, IE 6 is used by 24.4 percent of people on the Web today, followed by IE 7, IE 8, Firefox 3.5, and Firefox 3, in descending order of popularity. Overall, IE has 65.7 percent share of usage.
iStockphoto has more early adopters in its population and therefore different browser preferences. The top five browsers on the site are Firefox, with 37.8 percent; IE, with 34.4 percent; Apple's Safari, with 22.3 percent; Google's Chrome, with 3.4 percent; and Opera, with 1.7 percent.
Among iStockphoto's IE traffic, the majority of people use version 7, but the tide is turning.
"We've seen an almost 2 percent migration of (IE) 6 to 8 in the last 60 days alone. We're hoping Windows 7 will push it even more quickly," Thompson said. "For us, even though it's a shrinking percentage, it still represents over 1 million visits per month, so I can't cut them off at the knees."
"I think we're dominated by geeks, designers, and small businesses, all who move more quickly than the enterprise--not to mention we're 35 percent Mac, with the iPhone about to overtake Linux for third place" among operating systems, Thompson said.
After inconspicuously lurking within Web sites' code for more than a decade, JavaScript has emerged to become a key battleground in a second era of Web browser wars.
JavaScript, which lets developers create everything from basic Web site menus to online spreadsheet applications, was born in the mid-1990s when Microsoft's Internet Explorer challenged the incumbent browser, Netscape's Navigator. IE won that war, but now it faces its own challenge from the heir to the Navigator throne, Mozilla's Firefox, along with upstarts including Google's Chrome, Apple's Safari, and Opera.
All the challengers tout JavaScript performance as a major part of their competitive attack--even to the point of naming their JavaScript engines built into their browsers: Chrome's V8, Firefox's TraceMonkey, Opera's Futhark and upcoming Carakan, and Safari's newly branded Nitro, which is Apple's version of WebKit's Squirrelfish.
Microsoft's tests of page-loading speeds gave it the edge over Chrome and Firefox. But page-loading speed isn't everything
(Credit: Microsoft)Though IE lags all these rivals in JavaScript performance, Microsoft does care about performance overall and JavaScript performance specifically. Even as Microsoft launched a brand-new browser version, Internet Explorer 8, on Thursday, however, it's also clear the company has a big difference of opinion about the matter.
"We're going to keep making the script engines faster (but) right now it's not clear how many people are gated by script performance," said IE general manager Dean Hachamovitch in an interview. "JavaScript comprises a small portion of how fast a Web page will render. It is a piece, but by no means the holy grail."
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A fractal tree explorer is one application at Chrome Experiments.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Ever since Google launched Chrome in September 2008, Google has been touting how fast its browser can run Web-based programs written in JavaScript. Now the company has launched a site called Chrome Experiments designed to show off what fast JavaScript can enable and to encourage adoption of the browser.
Browser benchmark performance scores make for nice bar charts, but they can be detached from real-world computing needs. Chrome Experiments--which don't require Chrome but sometimes break without it--are a collection of taxing applications written in JavaScript that are designed to be more engaging.
Among the 19 examples so far available: beach balls bouncing from one browser window to another, control-tab animations, fractal trees, and 3D image modeling.
"To build these experiments, we reached out to a number of well-known Web designers and JavaScript developers including REAS, Mr. Doob, Ryan Alexander, Josh Nimoy, and Toxi, who have posted their creations on the site. We are also looking to constantly update the site with new submissions, so developers and designers are encouraged to build their own experiments and submit them through the site," Google said of the site.
JavaScript is used for many mundane features on the Web, but it's also the foundation of more sophisticated Web applications such as Google Docs. Unsurprisingly, given Google's Web application ambitions, the company wants to advance its maturity.
Google wants people to use Chrome.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)So it should be no surprise also that when visiting the site with a non-Chrome browser, you're presented with a warning: "We highly recommend you launch this experiment in Google Chrome. It may run slower, or not at all, in other browsers," then offers a handy Chrome download link.
Google has been advertising Chrome, too, which is unusual for the company. Clearly it has high hopes for the browser.
Of course, all the experiments worked for me in Chrome, but I tried them in several other browsers as well, with mixed results. One of my favorites, Ball Pool, which lets you spray patterned circles that stack up, then shake the window to make them slosh around, was illustrative. On Firefox 3.1 beta 3, it worked fine. On the Safari 4 beta, it worked, but sometimes with edges of balls sliced off. With Opera, the balls moved smoothly, but shaking the window didn't work. With the Internet Explorer 8 release candidate, it didn't work at all.
The "Monster" application at Chrome Experiments performs 3D modeling with JavaScript.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Google's latest version of Chrome has claimed the lead in my JavaScript speed tests, but Apple's new Safari 4 beta is the first browser to challenge it on Google's own performance benchmark.
JavaScript is a programming language that powers not just innumerable ordinary Web sites, but also many Web-based applications such as Google Docs. With the computing industry's major push to cloud computing, Web application performance is increasingly important, and there's a race on to see who's got the best JavaScript engine. JavaScript engines even have become a named feature, with Chrome's V8, Firefox's TraceMonkey, Opera's Futhark and upcoming Carakan, and now the Safari's newly branded Nitro, which is Apple's version of WebKit's Squirrelfish.
On the SunSpider test, the new Safari 4 beta scored third place.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)Chrome programmers have switched out a third-party software package in favor of their own as part of Google's attempt to speed its open-source browser up more.
The change came with a key component for processing JavaScript text called regular expressions. "As we've improved other parts of the language, regexps started to stand out as being slower than the rest. We felt it should be possible to improve performance by integrating with our existing infrastructure rather than using an external library," according to a Chromium blog post by programmers Erik Corry, Christian Plesner Hansen, and Lasse Reichstein Holst Nielsen.
Thus was born Google's own project, Irregexp, the headline feature in the new developer preview version of Chrome, 2.0.160.0 (release notes). Check the blog post if you're curious about the technical details of Google's choices about native code generation, backtracking avoidance, and intermediate automaton representation.
Previously, Chrome used a supporting software package, or library, called JPCRE, a variation by the Webkit browser project of the PCRE package. That eased compatibility issues by making Chrome behave more like Apple's Safari, which is based on Webkit, but Google thinks it's got the compatibility issue in hand.
"During development we have tested Irregexp against one million of the most popular Web pages to ensure that the new implementation stays compatible with our previous implementation and the Web," the programmers said.
Separately, the programmers said they created a new third version of their JavaScript benchmark. This version specifically exercises regular expressions taken from 50 of the Web's most popular pages.
JavaScript is increasingly widely used to build sophisticated Web applications, including Google Docs and Gmail, for example.
Speed is particularly important because JavaScript is used for interactive aspects of Web pages, where fast response or annoying lags are noticeable by people controlling the application. But it's also widely used for many more mundane aspects of Web pages, so JavaScript speedup helps improve Web browsing performance broadly.
Chrome's JavaScript engine is called V8. Mozilla's Firefox has TraceMonkey, and WebKithas Squirrelfix Extreme. Opera hopes to outdo all those with its own new JavaScript engine, called Carakan.
More changes are coming to V8, though, and Google will detail some at its May developer conference, Google I/O. One session there will focus on the software, including "initiatives that will propel V8 to the next performance level," according to the session notes.
Separately, Google also released the new version 1.0.154.46 of Chrome for both its stable and beta version users on Wednesday. That version fixed a security problem and an issue with Chrome's incognito mode.
Apple's Macworld announcement about professional and celebrity music instruction as part of GarageBand '09 may have been impressive, but what might be a little more eye catching (and ultimately useful) is iPerform3D. This browser-based music learning system shows users how to play guitar in 3D, and works on both Macs and PCs.
iPerform3D eschews A-list music celebrities like Sting and Sarah McLachlan in place of guitar-playing veterans who have undergone motion capture recording of their entire bodies (fingers especially) to teach you various lessons. To learn, you get control of a 3D video player that lets you change vantage points, as well as slow down or speed up the lesson.
The service's claim to fame is that this 3D viewer gets rid of some of the limitations that come from simply watching someone play in a video or over a Web cam. You can zoom around behind the neck of the guitar and see through where your fingers are supposed to go. It's pretty neat, and a lot easier than trying to reverse the image in your head to do what you're seeing. Each video comes with three view presets, although you can simply click and drag around with your mouse to adjust each angle further.
iPerform3D's player lets you zoom around to whatever angle you want, and includes three button presets to let you skip to ones that cover finger placement. Click to enlarge.
(Credit: CNET Networks)The service offers both a beginner course ($40) and three different monthly membership subscriptions ranging from $30 for one month all the way up to $140 for an entire year. These give you access to set of intermediate lessons and "jam tracks" which serve as background loops for you to practice what you've learned.
One thing worth noting is that the service won't work without the installation of the Unity-3D rendering engine (which isn't just a simple browser add-on). The upside of this is that once it's installed on your machine you can run the lessons from almost any of your browsers, although IE, Firefox, and Safari are the only ones "supported."
Here's the video pitch:
Google's Chrome now is only a smidgen slower than Mozilla's Firefox on the SunSpider test of JavaScript.
(Credit: CNET News)On Tuesday, Mozilla released Firefox 3.1 beta 2 and Google released Chrome 0.4.154.33, so it's time for the latest installment of JavaScript performance testing.
Here's the highlight: Though Firefox remains the leader on the SunSpider test, with a score of 2,110, Chrome edged very close with 2,140. A lower score is better; because of some variation in results, the numbers I quoted are an average of several runs.
Firefox and Chrome aren't the only browsers out there, but they're interesting to compare for a few reasons. First, they're both open-source projects launched to shake up the establishment with new ideas about the browsing experience. Second, given that philosophical alignment, they're likely to appeal to the same early-adopter crowd. Finally, both have new JavaScript engines, Chrome's V8 and Mozilla's TraceMonkey, which in the new beta is switched on by default.
JavaScript is used to build sophisticated Web sites such as Gmail or Google Docs, but it's also widely used for more ordinary operations, so faster JavaScript performance is desirable. One interesting possibility Google has raised for Web applications though is to bypass JavaScript altogether and use Google's new Native Client software, a research project that lets Web-based software run closer to the speeds of regular software on a computer.
Chrome is making steady gains in Google's JavaScript test; Firefox is much slower and has a mixed record.
(Credit: CNET News)SunSpider is only one test, though; Google has its own JavaScript benchmark on which Chrome wins hands-down. A glitch in the first Firefox beta kept me from testing it on Google's benchmarks, but the new beta runs again, yielding a score of 182. That's lower than the earlier Firefox 3.1 beta's 235 score, so perhaps something is still amiss. Either way, it's a far cry from Chrome 0.4.154.33's score of 2,635.
The usual caveats: your mileage may vary; I ran these tests on a dual-core Lenovo T61 laptop with 3GB of memory and Windows XP. JavaScript is only one aspect of Web browsing performance, and indeed of browsers overall. Also, this software is still in beta, Chrome in particular a developer beta. Finally, I apologize to those who've been asking, but time constraints have kept me from trying the latest WebKit builds and Opera.
According to Mark Larson, Google's Chrome program manager, Chrome 0.4.154.33 fixes a crash when opening the Options dialog box on 64-bit Windows and some issues using Hotmail. "Hotmail still does not properly recognize Google Chrome," though, Larson said in his announcement of the new version, though it can be fooled into thinking it's using a more mainstream browser. For details, check the instructions on the release notes.
On the SunSpider JavaScript peformance test, the new Google Chrome beta edges closer to TraceMonkey-enhanced Firefox. But the cutting-edge 'Minefield' version of Firefox edges ahead, too.
(Credit: CNET News)Google began updating Chrome users with the new beta version, and my performance tests show the company has ratcheted the browser's speed up another notch.
Google Chrome's latest version, 0.3.154.9, shows a 37 percent JavaScript performance improvement over the initial beta released two months ago.
JavaScript is a programming language used to add some pizazz to innumerable Web pages, but more importantly from Google's perspective, to power sophisticated Web applications such as Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Gmail. JavaScript is also up against Adobe Systems' Flash and Flex, Microsoft's Silverlight, and HTML 5, in the competition for what's the best foundation for Web applications.
Google has begun automatically updating all Chrome users to the new 0.3.154.9 beta version.
(Credit: CNET News)Using Google's JavaScript benchmark I pitted the newest Chrome beta, version 0.3.154.9, against both the initial beta from September and the more raw 0.3.154.3 developer release from mid-October. A higher number is better on this test, and the first beta scored 1,851, the 0.3.154.3 developer release 2,265, and the new 0.3.154.9 beta 2,546.
Google's tests aren't the only game in town; many use the SunSpider test. Here, too, the new Chrome got a notch faster, getting the test done in 2,546 milliseconds compared with 2,904 milliseconds for 0.3.154.3. (We couldn't test the first version because the testing site was down at the time.)
The new Chrome score catches closer to the 2,250 millisecond score of Firefox 3.1 beta 1 with its new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine enabled. (Tech-Recipes has useful instructions on how to enable TraceMonkey.)
On blogger Matt Asay's advice, I tested Minefield, the cutting-edge version of Firefox that's updated daily. (Minefield is downloadable from Mozilla's FTP site for those willing to use very untested software).
It had the best SunSpider score so far on my machine, 2,147 milliseconds. However, Firefox still lags on Google's speed test. Chrome's latest score of 2,546 is miles ahead of the 215 score from Minefield.
The latest beta version of Google Chrome is a notch faster on Google's JavaScript speed tests, where a larger number is better. The cutting-edge 'Minefield' version of Firefox takes a step back from the the 3.1 beta 1 of Firefox, without the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine enabled. All the Firefox versions trail Chrome on this test significantly.
(Credit: CNET News)There could be something fishy going on here, though: Minefield, which has TraceMonkey turned on, actually is slower than Firefox 3.1 beta 1 with TraceMonkey turned off, which is hardly the result you'd expect for a JavaScript speed test. TraceMonkey-enabled Firefox 3.1 beta 1 couldn't run the test because of a bug, and though that bug was fixed in Minefield, there could be something else awry.
And again with the caveats: These tests were run on a dual-core Windows XP machine, and your mileage will undoubtedly vary. They're synthetic benchmarks that may not accurately represent all the particular JavaScript you have to run. And JavaScript isn't the sole measure of a browser's speed.
The team at Pingdom, a firm that focuses primarily on uptime and performance, has posted a new blog entry estimating that Facebook will overtake MySpace as the top social network in the U.S. within a month or two. That's largely because, according to the same numbers, Facebook has doubled in size in the past year.
Several months ago, traffic firm ComScore noted that Facebook--a year ago far smaller than the News Corp.-owned MySpace--was starting to pass its rival in worldwide traffic. But in the U.S., which still has the big ad dollars, MySpace remained bigger.
There's something to note, though: Pingdom used Google Trends to make its assessment. Google Trends traffic data is one of only many sources of statistics out there, and it's collected primarily from people who have installed the Google toolbar. Numbers from Compete.com, for example, show that MySpace is still ahead.
Even according to Pingdom's numbers, MySpace doesn't appear to be shrinking. The performance firm thinks that could be due to a number of factors: that MySpace is continuing to recruit new users to replace those who may have left for Facebook, that people are using both social networks, or that Facebook is recruiting members who haven't been prior users of either site.
Just about every browser out there now is trying to grab the crown for fastest performance for running JavaScript, the programming language that powers many increasingly sophisticated Web-based applications. The latest development is from the programmers behind Apple's Safari.
Mozilla bragged earlier this month about TraceMonkey, a new JavaScript engine due to ship in Firefox 3.1 near the end of 2008. Next came Google's Chrome, a leading feature of which is the performance of its V8 JavaScript engine. Now the WebKit programmers, whose open-source code is used in Apple's Safari browser and the Konqueror browser of the KDE interface software sometimes used on Linux systems, have a new version of their JavaScript technology.
It's called Squirrelfish Extreme, and the WebKit programmers said Thursday in a blog posting that it's more than twice as fast as the first-generation Squirrelfish announced in June and more than three times faster than the current WebKit 3.1 version. They based their conclusions on one benchmark, SunSpider.
"SquirrelFish Extreme uses more advanced techniques, including fast native code generation, to deliver even more JavaScript performance," the programmers said.
For details of Squirrelfish's techniques--bytecode optimization, a polymorphic inline cache, a context-threaded just-in-time compiler, and a regular expression just-in-time compiler--check the WebKit blog.
Charles Ying also performed SunSpider tests that showed Squirrelfish beating Google's V8 and Mozilla's Tracemonkey on a 2.4GHz iMac.
WebKit's SquirrelFish Extreme is faster than its three-month-old predecessor on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark.
(Credit: WebKit)
