The GPU Acceleration Situation In Firefox 6

[liam]

I vaguely recall seeing it some time ago and thinking "why should i do that as an app-specific feature when i have a perfectly good general-purpose window manager?". I do drag tabs between windows (in both Chrome and FF), and to the desktop to move a tab to its own window.




it's usually one (or two or occasionally more) windows per site, with tabs for each article i'm interested in reading. e.g. one for phoronix[1], one for slashdot, one for LWN, one for theage.com.au, one each for several other tech/news/review or other frequently visited sites, at least one window for each google search (new window per search with a tab for each likely looking result), etc. Any of the articles in a tab may be interesting enough to fork off another window for any linked-to site(s). And I sometimes open a new window when the tab titles become too small to be useful (i don't like the tab title bar to scroll or to use more than one line).

I also use other browsers for particular tasks just to isolate certain things from regular usage - e.g. i use Galeon pretty much only for online banking. Start it up when i need to login to my bank, and quit as soon as i've logged out - I used to do that as a separate user (i have gdm configured to start up two login screens, on vt7 and vt8) but i rarely bother doing that any more.

Looking at my taskbar right now, i have 18 Chromium windows open and 2 Iceweasel windows (Iceweasel is open because I haven't found a good Chrome substitute for Firefox's Hilarious webcomic manager plugin. and if i want to use ItsAllText to edit a forum post or something in a decent editor - vi - rather than in the browser).

I use the "Always Group Windows" option in my gnome panel taskbar. So i have just one taskbar tab saying "Chromium (18)" and another saying "Iceweasel (2)". a total of 2 taskbar items rather than 20 (not including other taskbar items for evince, mrxvt, gnome-terminal, gnumeric, and a few others).


(why mrxvt AND gnome-terminal? because mrxvt doesn't suck like GT does, but mrxvt doesn't do utf-8. so i mostly use mrxvt, and GT when i actually care about unicode characters. mrxvt currently has 15 terminal tabs open and GT currently has 4)



[1] this is why i find phoronix's practice of only linking to itself except in rare and unusual circumstances to be really annoying. if i'm reading an article about "Foo" then I want a link to Foo's web site, not to some 3 year old phoronix article that's sort-of related, and then follow the circle-jerk until (if i'm lucky) i find a link or give up and google it. My guess is that Ph. does it because he/they are scared people will leave the site via an external link. truth is, that's far more likely to happen if you have to stuff around to find the external site. I've lost count of the times i've thought (or said aloud!) something like "just give me a f*ing link so i can read the source material myself!".

I haven't found a WM yet that would work well in that situation. Sounds like too much work to have to parse that window list (even though they are grouped you've still got that list of 18 windows to read through).
The advantages of using FF's internal "window manager" are:
1. quite scalable (you can type search for specific tabs/groups, or use an expose feature that uses spatial recognition(keeps windows/groups in the exact place you put them), or you can just use the list like your window manager lets you do now -- either way it is nothing but a superset of your WM)
2. designed specifically for task oriented management
3. less memory used

Some of the very scriptable WM's many work well in your situation, but I haven't seen them.
I just don't think WM's are designed with that many windows open in mind.

Obviously, do what you like best, but, IMHO, you would be well served to at least try FF's tab management. It has been criticized for not being useful for the average user, or not intuitive, but I've never heard anyone say that it wasn't very well suited to exactly your usage type.

Best/Liam

[_cas_]

While your total number of tabs open is not very high, having them in separate windows is interesting. Have you tried FF's tab groups? I works a bit like a window manager in FF with expose and dragging tabs/tab groups to new desktops/tab groups.

I vaguely recall seeing it some time ago and thinking "why should i do that as an app-specific feature when i have a perfectly good general-purpose window manager?". I do drag tabs between windows (in both Chrome and FF), and to the desktop to move a tab to its own window.

Wow, I just can't imagine having to deal with 30 WINDOWS open...

it's usually one (or two or occasionally more) windows per site, with tabs for each article i'm interested in reading. e.g. one for phoronix[1], one for slashdot, one for LWN, one for theage.com.au, one each for several other tech/news/review or other frequently visited sites, at least one window for each google search (new window per search with a tab for each likely looking result), etc. Any of the articles in a tab may be interesting enough to fork off another window for any linked-to site(s). And I sometimes open a new window when the tab titles become too small to be useful (i don't like the tab title bar to scroll or to use more than one line).

I also use other browsers for particular tasks just to isolate certain things from regular usage - e.g. i use Galeon pretty much only for online banking. Start it up when i need to login to my bank, and quit as soon as i've logged out - I used to do that as a separate user (i have gdm configured to start up two login screens, on vt7 and vt8) but i rarely bother doing that any more.

Looking at my taskbar right now, i have 18 Chromium windows open and 2 Iceweasel windows (Iceweasel is open because I haven't found a good Chrome substitute for Firefox's Hilarious webcomic manager plugin. and if i want to use ItsAllText to edit a forum post or something in a decent editor - vi - rather than in the browser).

I use the "Always Group Windows" option in my gnome panel taskbar. So i have just one taskbar tab saying "Chromium (18)" and another saying "Iceweasel (2)". a total of 2 taskbar items rather than 20 (not including other taskbar items for evince, mrxvt, gnome-terminal, gnumeric, and a few others).


(why mrxvt AND gnome-terminal? because mrxvt doesn't suck like GT does, but mrxvt doesn't do utf-8. so i mostly use mrxvt, and GT when i actually care about unicode characters. mrxvt currently has 15 terminal tabs open and GT currently has 4)



[1] this is why i find phoronix's practice of only linking to itself except in rare and unusual circumstances to be really annoying. if i'm reading an article about "Foo" then I want a link to Foo's web site, not to some 3 year old phoronix article that's sort-of related, and then follow the circle-jerk until (if i'm lucky) i find a link or give up and google it. My guess is that Ph. does it because he/they are scared people will leave the site via an external link. truth is, that's far more likely to happen if you have to stuff around to find the external site. I've lost count of the times i've thought (or said aloud!) something like "just give me a f*ing link so i can read the source material myself!".

[liam]

on an AMD Phenom II 940 running Debian Sid & Linux 3.0.0-1-amd64 with an Nvidia 560Ti (v. 280.13 proprietary nvidia driver), I get:

Chromium 13.0.782.107~r9423: 21 fps
Epiphany 2.0.14: 21 fps. (crashed the first time i tried it. ran OK the 2nd)
Midori 0.4.0: 21 fps

Iceweasel 6.0: 60+ fps (page says "Results limited to 60FPS", probably vsync turned on or something)
Iceape 2.0.14: 60+ fps
Galeon 2.0.7: 60+ fps

I'll guess that Chromium, Ephiphany, and Midori aren't using HW Acceleration. 21 fps isn't bad for software rendering.

Firefox/Iceweasel was my primary browser until a few months ago when i accidentally switched to Chromium (tried it out and it was OK, a few weeks later i noticed i hadn't been using FF at all). Except for It'sAllText, I've found mostly-acceptable substitutes for my favourite FF plugins, but I still prefer FF...the responsiveness and javascript performance of Cr are the only reasons i'm using it.

I'll switch back when a) FF's js performance improves and b) FF can run each tab (or at least each window) in a separate process. FF's performance really sucks when you have 20 or 30 browser windows open with 5-15 tabs each (which is fairly normal for me - i leave my browser running for weeks or months)....Chromium copes with it easily.

While your total number of tabs open is not very high, having them in separate windows is interesting. Have you tried FF's tab groups? I works a bit like a window manager in FF with expose and dragging tabs/tab groups to new desktops/tab groups.
Wow, I just can't imagine having to deal with 30 WINDOWS open...
* running FF6 *

[_cas_]

How well does your PC do with this benchmark?

http://demos.hacks.mozilla.org/openweb/HWACCEL/

I get <1 FPS without GPU acceleration under Linux w/ Catalyst 9.3 drivers..

on an AMD Phenom II 940 running Debian Sid & Linux 3.0.0-1-amd64 with an Nvidia 560Ti (v. 280.13 proprietary nvidia driver), I get:

Chromium 13.0.782.107~r9423: 21 fps
Epiphany 2.0.14: 21 fps. (crashed the first time i tried it. ran OK the 2nd)
Midori 0.4.0: 21 fps

Iceweasel 6.0: 60+ fps (page says "Results limited to 60FPS", probably vsync turned on or something)
Iceape 2.0.14: 60+ fps
Galeon 2.0.7: 60+ fps

I'll guess that Chromium, Ephiphany, and Midori aren't using HW Acceleration. 21 fps isn't bad for software rendering.

Firefox/Iceweasel was my primary browser until a few months ago when i accidentally switched to Chromium (tried it out and it was OK, a few weeks later i noticed i hadn't been using FF at all). Except for It'sAllText, I've found mostly-acceptable substitutes for my favourite FF plugins, but I still prefer FF...the responsiveness and javascript performance of Cr are the only reasons i'm using it.

I'll switch back when a) FF's js performance improves and b) FF can run each tab (or at least each window) in a separate process. FF's performance really sucks when you have 20 or 30 browser windows open with 5-15 tabs each (which is fairly normal for me - i leave my browser running for weeks or months)....Chromium copes with it easily.

[liam]

afiak ironlake is newer than the 4500MHD (I believe that's Cantiga). Mine's an i5 with the on die HD graphics which may explain the difference (less mature drivers maybe?)

Both chrome and firefox have very disappointing hardware acceleration performance for me . I am running arch linux so my kernel/mesa/drivers are very up to date as well.

I don't know why I thought Ironlake=4500MHD but now I can't find out what the graphics is called. Ark(http://ark.intel.com/products/43560/...specifications) doesn't even give it a name
Regardless, we have basically the same graphics set since they are both Ironlake though, as stated, mine is an i7.
I wonder if it is something weird that Arch did (or didnt) do. If you can, try a live fedora 15/16 and see how it works (http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/16-Alpha.RC5/).
I haven't tried RC5 yet, but RC4 worked well (and it should have FF6).

Best/Liam

[bwat47]

Strange.
On a T510 with 4500MHD(Ironlake) I see no change in performance whether I force-enable acceleration or not (and for that firefox rotational benchmark mentioned earlier I get around 44fps on an M620).
However, I DID have massive slowdowns awhile back with FF4, IIRC.

afiak ironlake is newer than the 4500MHD (I believe that's Cantiga). Mine's an i5 with the on die HD graphics which may explain the difference (less mature drivers maybe?)

Both chrome and firefox have very disappointing hardware acceleration performance for me . I am running arch linux so my kernel/mesa/drivers are very up to date as well.

[liam]

Firefox gpu acceleration in linux is still absolute shot for me (its only gotten semi-usable in firefox 8). It just makes everything slower right now If I enable opengl layers.

I have intel ironlake graphics.

Strange.
On a T510 with 4500MHD(Ironlake) I see no change in performance whether I force-enable acceleration or not (and for that firefox rotational benchmark mentioned earlier I get around 44fps on an M620).
However, I DID have massive slowdowns awhile back with FF4, IIRC.

[smitty3268]

V8 scores

V8 benchmark scores should go up about 1000 points when TI lands. After that, FF devs seem to think most of the rest of the difference between it and Chrome comes down to the garbage collector. Planned changes to bring the FF GC up to speed are upcoming, but may not happen for another 3-4 months while TI settles.

[NomadDemon]

How well does your PC do with this benchmark?

http://demos.hacks.mozilla.org/openweb/HWACCEL/

I get <1 FPS without GPU acceleration under Linux w/ Catalyst 9.3 drivers..

ubuntu 11.04
open drivers
radeon 4850
firefox 6
60+ fps

V8
Score: 3317
Richards: 5072
DeltaBlue: 3921
Crypto: 2998
RayTrace: 3967
EarleyBoyer: 4150
RegExp: 1357

[hal2k1]

Maybe I didn't understand your post, but GPU and graphics drivers will have no impact on the V8 tests.

That is a javascript CPU only test.

GPU acceleration will only affect stuff that is actually drawing something on the screen.

Not only was the OP not talking about graphics GPU acceleration, he was also talking about Windows. WTF?