[HN Gopher] Thorium - The first browser to score over 600 speedo...
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Thorium - The first browser to score over 600 speedometer points on
a Mac M3 Pro
Author : midzer
Score : 43 points
Date : 2024-01-06 20:08 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| midzer wrote:
| For prove, screenshot in release notes at the bottom.
| vitalipom wrote:
| Do you need such thing?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Screenshots are always nice, but how would that prove anything?
| If they're going to lie about it, they could just as easily
| fabricate a screenshot. (And if you trust them not to do that
| then why not trust the claim outright)
| midzer wrote:
| The web is built upon trust.
| pxeger1 wrote:
| Thorium is a fork of Chromium, optimised for speed.
| altairprime wrote:
| " _Outline of benefits of Thorium over vanilla Chromium._ "
| https://alex313031.blogspot.com/2022/01/outline-of-benefits-...
| (2022)
| speps wrote:
| Oof that's a read... https://alex313031.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-
| good-bad-and-ugl...
| binkHN wrote:
| Wow. That's quite the agenda.
| sapiogram wrote:
| The only true oof thing is him being in the hospital for a
| month, the rest sounds no worse than any other open source
| drama.
| RCitronsBroker wrote:
| really? is it? this entire outrage felt petty, malicious and
| nitpicky to me from the get go. is it really that big of a
| deal? if minors are deep enough into tech to play around with
| an open source chromium fork, they have been exposed to far,
| far more and probably darker stuff than raunchy,
| anthropomorphized bunnies or whatever. this is someone's pet
| project, probably someone rather young themselves. it entirely
| possible you even found use in this someone's pet project. And
| now you're coming after them because of a cringy Easter egg?
| That's just f*ckin mean
| speps wrote:
| Whatever age this individual is doesn't matter really. It
| seems that the situation has been handled, and I'm sure it
| was a massive lesson.
|
| I didn't do anything but repost the bold link from the first
| paragraph of TFA...
| coldblues wrote:
| I agree. It was hugely overblown. A big part of the LLM and
| Stable Diffusion software originates from 4chan's /g/ board.
| When a significant portion of cyber security specialists are
| furries who even post NSFW furry art on their social media
| profiles, is it really so surprising? It feels like another
| puritanical crusade and outrage culture at play.
| hinkley wrote:
| On April 2, 1995, Mosaic for Windows users awoke to discover
| their browsers were behaving oddly.
|
| About three weeks earlier, the team was celebrating wrapping up
| a release at a reasonable hour (for once) when I uttered the
| words, "You know, this is the last release we are putting out
| before April Fools' day."
|
| Everyone in earshot somehow thought this was a tremendously
| valid point. By 1:00 am there was not one but around five
| separate Easter eggs set to go off on April 1.
|
| You will note I said April 2 above. I sat with the lead dev as
| we verified how date and time offsets worked so we didn't have
| any off by one errors. Seems that some fields were zero indexed
| while others were one indexed. Terrible MS API. We came to
| consensus on what was right, we may have even tested it, and I
| left.
|
| But unfortunately he had a crisis of faith an hour later and
| created the off by one error. Luckily for us April 1 that year
| was a Saturday. A lot of our users, who had internet at work,
| never saw the prank at all, even with the off by one error.
|
| On Sunday the tech support emails started rolling in, and our
| clever little joke started to reveal itself as poor judgement.
| Some people got the joke, but many thought we had been hacked.
| By Monday we had a canned response, apologizing for our bad
| judgement and anyone who got freaked out thinking they got a
| virus, or that we did.
|
| Three proper adults and three college seniors and nobody said
| stop.
| areoform wrote:
| Would you be open to explaining the joke and the error?
|
| I'm not able to decipher what went wrong from your comment
| right now (though it might just be me!).
| hinkley wrote:
| Is April first the zeroth day of April or the 1st? Turns
| out it was the 0th.
|
| The jokes were some ui changes. The icon spinning backward
| and the progress bar saying April Fool's in rainbow text
| every nth page load. A bouncing logo screen saver like
| behavior that would wipe a window that had been idle for X
| minutes (restored on mouse over).
|
| I think there was one more, but the last I remember was the
| lead's idea. After four (1?) hours idle, if you had audio
| enabled, you would hear the lead rapping his knuckles on
| his monitor and saying, "Hello? Is anybody there?" That
| could be funny or it could be terrifying.
| orenlindsey wrote:
| This browser looks ok, but stuff like this turns me off from
| using it.
|
| Single-developer projects are always risky. What if the dev
| just decides to stop developing it? Or there's a massive
| vulnerability, and they're on vacation with no internet?
| taosx wrote:
| Was not aware of Thorium, looks interesting. Now I'm wondering if
| node.js could benefit from some of these optimizations?
| flandish wrote:
| Thorium - fast, especially if you like furry porn in your source
| code.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38647363
| olliej wrote:
| Oh, it's just chromium with I'm guessing some questionable PGO
| choices and similar.
|
| I can't speak for blink/chromium, but as I spent most of a decade
| working on webkit and JSC, there are lots of trade offs for
| performance that can heavily benefit benchmarks without
| benefitting real web content. * First off PGO.
| You have to be very careful when you do profile guided
| optimization as you _could_ simply do nothing but do the
| profiling passes on benchmarks, but if you aren't testing actual
| web content you can pessimize actual page load performance
| (speedometer tries to be better at general browser perf than
| older benchmarks but you easily fall into a trap equivalent to
| making your browser the fastest at loading gmail but slower at
| yahoo mail :D) * A lot of modern browser performance
| comes as a result of caching policy, not in the download sense,
| but internal data structures. For example many years ago when I
| implemented bytecode caching in JSC (literally JS string
| source->bytecode) which saves you parsing and codegen time, but
| uses a lot of memory. A lot of the qualification for enabling
| that was "how much memory should be willing to burn in exchange
| for this performance", how time sensitive should the cache be,
| etc. Similarly you can get significant performance wins by making
| the GC heap large enough that you avoid sweeping during a
| benchmark. * Browsers also do a lot of event
| coalescing to try and minimize unnecessary dispatch costs,
| relayout, and repainting. You can generally adjust the coalescing
| policies and you can get good "performance" wins by increasing
| the coalescing windows, but the result can be perceivable
| lagginess and similar, but again it will help "performance" as
| measure by wall clock.
|
| There are many many trade offs beyond just these that impact
| performance, and those impact perceptual performance, wall time
| performance, memory usage (people complain about memory usage in
| modern browsers but you can improve wall time "performance" by
| increasing that even more), and power (which matters for any
| mobile device).
|
| It should not be a surprise that you can configure a chromium
| build (or gecko, or webkit) that can "out perform" the default
| configuration at some [set of] benchmark[s], but you should ask
| yourself why in a field as performance sensitive as browser and
| js engines the developers aren't already doing what you've done,
| and maybe the result of your changes is actually lower overall
| performance or otherwise worse user experience.
| delusional wrote:
| > you should ask yourself why in a field as performance
| sensitive as browser and js engines the developers aren't
| already doing what you've done, and maybe the result of your
| changes is actually lower overall performance or otherwise
| worse user experience.
|
| Of course you should, but you should also play around with the
| settings and publish your findings. If we didn't explore we
| wouldn't learn anything. It's possible that those other
| developers simply didn't consider a setting important, or that
| what they consider normal browser usage isn't the actually
| common case.
|
| We should encourage experimentation of all kinds.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Chromium is optimized to perform as well as it can across every
| computer that's supported, I think. That includes real cheap
| netbooks as long as they can run a new enough operating system
| (currently, I think, Windows 10). Thorium is optimized to
| perform as well as it can on more modern CPUs with more
| supported instruction-set extensions, IIRC.
| cmiller1 wrote:
| I didn't think they made an M3 Mac Pro yet.
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(page generated 2024-01-06 23:00 UTC)