[Sugar-devel] ideal flash activity to be remade as karma activity

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 15:20, Benjamin M. Schwartz
<bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
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> Bryan Berry wrote:
>> I would rather try titanium than xulrunner simply because I have the
>> vague perception that webkit is significantly faster than gecko. I don't
>> have any empirical evidence regarding this.
>
> I have no real perception that webkit is faster.

My view on this is that there's some healthy amount of competition
between webkit and mozilla and that the wisest thing may be to try to
use both.

But as Benjamin pointed out, there's no clear evidence that we should
chose one over the other, so we should make sure we keep the one that
is working for the foreseeable future.

Regards,

Tomeu

> There are three main
> things to benchmark with a browser: memory usage (very important on an
> XO), rendering speed, and javascript performance.  Firefox 3 has the best
> memory efficiency on the market [1].  Both webkit and Firefox actually
> perform all rendering by calling out to the Cairo graphics library, so I
> do not expect a big difference there [2].  On javascript performance,
> Mozilla's new Tracemonkey engine (already released in their betas) is
> possibly the fastest javascript interpreter (it's actually a compiler!) on
> the planet [3].
>
> Certainly, this doesn't add up to a scientific level of evidence, but it
> definitely makes me suspicious of any conventional wisdom that gecko is slow.
>
> I really haven't been that impressed with Titanium.  They don't provide
> the one thing we are really missing: a visual interface for designing
> simple programs.  What they do provide looks to me like a clone of Google
> Gears, plus some other desktop-oriented stuff that won't work in Sugar
> [4][5].  (By the way, if you like webkit, we could also use Gears with
> Webkit, without even having to modify the javascript part.)
>
> My #1 reason for pushing xulrunner (+Gears) is that it's already part of
> the system.  I'd really like to avoid having both browsers installed, but
> I'm not aware of any credible replacement for Browse using webkit.
>
> - --Ben
>
> P.S.  Xulrunner will also give us built-in support for Vorbis+Theora and
> <audio> + <video>, solving the other thing that people use Flash for....
> and with last night's release of libtheora 1.1 alpha 1 ("Thusnelda"),
> Theora is actually a decent codec [6][7].
>
> [1] http://dotnetperls.com/Content/Browser-Memory.aspx
> [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(graphics)#Notable_usage
> [3]
> http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/09/tracemonkey_update.html
> [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_gears#Components
> [5] http://titanium-js.appspot.com/Core/Titanium
> [6] http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/theora/
> [7] http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo5.html (this is old;
> thusnelda has since improved further)
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