You are looking at posts that were written in the month of November in the year 2005.
Posted on November 10th, 2005 by Tim.
Categories: Programming, Quotes, Tim.
[19:28] Tim: its okay, i know women are pre-emptive multithreaded
[19:28] Tim: instead of men are from mars, women are from venus….
[19:28] Tim: men are dos, women are unix
[19:29] Liz: yeah but at least we don’t get stuck in a mutex loop
Posted on November 10th, 2005 by Tim.
Categories: Programming, Tim.
Tim’s code archive has a new file up. Check it out here. It’s a modification to Civilization 2 that makes civ2 well behaved with the rest of the system, i.e. bringing the cpu usage down from 100%.
~Tim
Posted on November 8th, 2005 by Tim.
Categories: Tim.
Liz just sent me a link to this music video:
Can I Live
(Note: You may have to click “open url” in media player.)
You need to check this out.
Why is this the only Nick Cannon song marked as Explicit on napster? Call me a conspiracy theorist…
Posted on November 7th, 2005 by Tim.
Categories: General/Misc., Tim.
I’ve been trying to determine the primary avantages and disadvantages of the currently available browsers. Currently, the ones I’ve been looking at are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Avant Browser. All four are free.
In the old days, the differences between browsers was primarily the rendering engine. Netscape and Explorer tended to render things very differently, especially when they each had their own “extensions” to the standard. These days, web pages generally look pretty much the same across browsers, as long as the web page sticks to the standards. Explorer has lagged behind on some newer standards, such as CSS and PNG transparency, though this will be changing within a year. Support within standards, however, generally produce very similar results across rendering engines, as long as the page has been created by a competent webmaster.
So in general, there are four main areas where browsers differ:
1. Performance
2. Security
3. User-Interface/Features
4. Standards Support
In this blog post, I’m going to look at performance first, since it’s relatively straightforward. I did some research on browser speed, and considered my qualitative perceptions and quantitatve data regarding the differences between the browsers.
Here is the link to the quantitative data I looked at.
The big surprise for most, looking at the chart, is that IE beats firefox in speed in every category, hands down (the one exception is in scripting). This may be somewhat misleading, however, since a factor in performance is the amount of memory used. Both IE and FF are huge memory hogs, but an advantage of FF is that it generally runs in a single process. Depending on how IE is launched, it may take up multiple processes, greatly increasing the amount of virtual memory used. However, if you look at how much the working set increases with each new instance of explorer, you can see that explorer definately mitigates some effects of running in multiple processes, possibly by using shared dll memory for the rendering engine. However, since IE does not have tabs, having numerous windows open can take a toll on the system performance through excessive use of window handles (a resource that is generally ignored). This can cause horrific results if you have too many internet exporer windows open at once. As a result, IE easily beats FF with a single window, but most likely scales poorly on computers with limited RAM. This will most likely be rectified in IE 7.
Avant browser has very similar performance characteristics to IE. Generally high memory usage it seems, and the rendering performance is very similar to IE. This is not surprising, since Avant uses the same rendering engine as IE.
The result that comes as no surprise (for me at least) is that Opera beats… well… everyone actually. Opera has always been the king when it comes to browser speed. In terms of memory usage, Opera and FF seem to have similar performance, so no big difference here. In general browsing, however, Opera blows away the competition. Navigation forward and back through recently visited pages is instantaneous. Rendering is snappy, and even feels faster when loading new pages, even though the connection speed is the same.
The clear winner here is Opera. Internet Explorer and Avant tie for second, and Firefox takes third.
Next time I blog, I’ll write about security, an area where firefox is sure to shine.
~Tim