What is it?

In short, it’s a twitter clone, a time waster, with a little more thought into it. Is it more complex? Maybe not, sometimes the right added functionality makes life easier for people.

Why you should try it?

I tried Jaiku, Pwnce, FriendFeed and Twitter, and stayed with Twitter. I’m actually proud to say that I’ve sent 6,801 Twitts that have landed me 390 twitter followers, and this is probably the hardest thing about switching from Twitter to another competitor, as good as it may be.

But from last week I’ve been hearing about Plurk, and today after some good web-reputable friends joined I decided to give it a try (see the power of web-prestige?), before they joined I just thought… “another twitter competitor”.

The added functionality might make things better, it’s probably the evolution of micro-blogging happening, and twitter needs better competition in order to get better.

This is the Part II of Benchmarks between Safari 3.1’s JavaScript engine and Firefox. Last Benchmark was done against Firefox 2, and Safari destroyed Firefox’s Javascript engine, in some aspects being up to 7 times faster.

So I was curious and I downloaded and tried the benchmark on Firefox 3.0b4. to see how much Firefox 3.0 will improve its Javascript performance, key to today’s web applications and the future of the web.

After seeing the results, I say Kudos to the Firefox 3 team, they’ve improved considerably their JavaScript engine and that only makes me glad cause I won’t have to switch to Safari. :)

I will not make any tests on HTML rendering, if you find any benchmark results on HTML rendering, please leave links on the comments section.

Once again, here are the results side by side:

FIREFOX 3.0b4
========================
RESULTS
(means and 95% confidence intervals)
-----------------------------------------
Total:                 3876.6ms +/- 0.9%
-----------------------------------------

  3d:                   489.0ms +/- 1.3%
    cube:               193.8ms +/- 1.2%
    morph:              138.2ms +/- 1.5%
    raytrace:           157.0ms +/- 3.8%

  access:               594.2ms +/- 5.6%
    binary-trees:        57.4ms +/- 5.9%
    fannkuch:           246.0ms +/- 0.8%
    nbody:              219.8ms +/- 13.6%
    nsieve:              71.0ms +/- 2.1%

  bitops:               470.4ms +/- 0.7%
    3bit-bits-in-byte:   67.8ms +/- 1.5%
    bits-in-byte:        90.8ms +/- 1.8%
    bitwise-and:        177.4ms +/- 1.1%
    nsieve-bits:        134.4ms +/- 0.5%

  controlflow:           42.4ms +/- 1.6%
    recursive:           42.4ms +/- 1.6%

  crypto:               257.2ms +/- 1.2%
    aes:                 87.4ms +/- 1.3%
    md5:                 83.8ms +/- 4.0%
    sha1:                86.0ms +/- 0.0%

  date:                 412.0ms +/- 0.4%
    format-tofte:       251.6ms +/- 0.6%
    format-xparb:       160.4ms +/- 0.4%

  math:                 502.0ms +/- 2.2%
    cordic:             188.0ms +/- 0.5%
    partial-sums:       231.2ms +/- 5.2%
    spectral-norm:       82.8ms +/- 3.6%

  regexp:               275.6ms +/- 1.0%
    dna:                275.6ms +/- 1.0%

  string:               833.8ms +/- 0.7%
    base64:              98.6ms +/- 1.4%
    fasta:              228.8ms +/- 3.2%
    tagcloud:           166.2ms +/- 0.6%
    unpack-code:        218.6ms +/- 0.5%
    validate-input:     121.6ms +/- 0.6%

SAFARI 3.1
========================
RESULTS
(means and 95% confidence intervals)
-----------------------------------------
Total:                 3368.8ms +/- 1.0%
-----------------------------------------

  3d:                   414.8ms +/- 1.9%
    cube:               132.2ms +/- 2.4%
    morph:              144.6ms +/- 4.1%
    raytrace:           138.0ms +/- 0.6%

  access:               520.4ms +/- 4.1%
    binary-trees:        78.6ms +/- 11.3%
    fannkuch:           231.4ms +/- 2.0%
    nbody:              149.2ms +/- 8.1%
    nsieve:              61.2ms +/- 3.9%

  bitops:               449.6ms +/- 2.4%
    3bit-bits-in-byte:   69.8ms +/- 9.6%
    bits-in-byte:        99.2ms +/- 4.6%
    bitwise-and:        167.2ms +/- 2.3%
    nsieve-bits:        113.4ms +/- 6.7%

  controlflow:           91.2ms +/- 4.7%
    recursive:           91.2ms +/- 4.7%

  crypto:               247.2ms +/- 2.3%
    aes:                 81.2ms +/- 2.5%
    md5:                 83.8ms +/- 4.6%
    sha1:                82.2ms +/- 2.0%

  date:                 306.4ms +/- 0.5%
    format-tofte:       146.6ms +/- 1.4%
    format-xparb:       159.8ms +/- 1.0%

  math:                 454.8ms +/- 1.3%
    cordic:             174.4ms +/- 1.6%
    partial-sums:       193.8ms +/- 1.2%
    spectral-norm:       86.6ms +/- 4.4%

  regexp:               209.6ms +/- 0.7%
    dna:                209.6ms +/- 0.7%

  string:               674.8ms +/- 2.2%
    base64:             103.8ms +/- 9.0%
    fasta:              177.0ms +/- 1.0%
    tagcloud:           136.0ms +/- 4.6%
    unpack-code:        136.0ms +/- 1.7%
    validate-input:     122.0ms +/- 2.6%

Almost there. Only in Flow control and recursion it beats Safari, the rest needs to improve, however, it’s improved a lot comparing to the previous version of Firefox.

The machine used for this test is a MacBook Pro running Mac OS X Version 10.4.11 with a 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 2GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM.

So I downloaded yesterday the latest Software Update for Mac OSX and it included an update of the Safari Web Browser, which I had taken for dead ages ago, I’m a hardcore Firefox user.

Today I read about the new updates, and I read something that caught my eye at Mackinando.com.

it executes JavaScript six times faster than the rest

I go to the Safari Site, and they compare themselves with a previous version, Firefox, and Opera (not IE, not even worth mentioning)

I couldn’t believe my eyes, so I googled for “JavaScript Benchmark“, and tried the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark onboth Firefox 2.0.0.12 and the shiny new Safari 3.1.

The machine used for this test is a MacBook Pro running Mac OS X Version 10.4.11 with a 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 2GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM.

Here are the results side by side:

FIREFOX 2.0.0.12
========================
RESULTS
(means and 95% confidence intervals)
-----------------------------------------
Total:                 15365.4ms +/- 1.7%
-----------------------------------------

  3d:                   2386.6ms +/- 7.9%
    cube:                733.0ms +/- 20.8%
    morph:              1269.8ms +/- 9.4%
    raytrace:            383.8ms +/- 37.1%

  access:               1386.2ms +/- 4.8%
    binary-trees:        201.6ms +/- 0.6%
    fannkuch:            294.8ms +/- 5.4%
    nbody:               691.2ms +/- 8.9%
    nsieve:              198.6ms +/- 1.5%

  bitops:               3461.2ms +/- 0.4%
    3bit-bits-in-byte:   275.8ms +/- 0.6%
    bits-in-byte:        248.2ms +/- 0.7%
    bitwise-and:        2765.2ms +/- 0.5%
    nsieve-bits:         172.0ms +/- 4.7%

  controlflow:           153.4ms +/- 0.7%
    recursive:           153.4ms +/- 0.7%

  crypto:                527.2ms +/- 0.5%
    aes:                 230.8ms +/- 1.2%
    md5:                 147.4ms +/- 0.5%
    sha1:                149.0ms +/- 0.6%

  date:                 2551.8ms +/- 0.3%
    format-tofte:       1449.6ms +/- 0.3%
    format-xparb:       1102.2ms +/- 0.8%

  math:                 1312.6ms +/- 12.8%
    cordic:              497.4ms +/- 12.0%
    partial-sums:        501.6ms +/- 1.6%
    spectral-norm:       313.6ms +/- 36.1%

  regexp:                501.0ms +/- 0.2%
    dna:                 501.0ms +/- 0.2%

  string:               3085.4ms +/- 10.3%
    base64:              914.6ms +/- 3.4%
    fasta:               676.0ms +/- 35.4%
    tagcloud:            441.4ms +/- 0.6%
    unpack-code:         846.8ms +/- 25.4%
    validate-input:      206.6ms +/- 1.1%

SAFARI 3.1
========================
RESULTS
(means and 95% confidence intervals)
-----------------------------------------
Total:                 3368.8ms +/- 1.0%
-----------------------------------------

  3d:                   414.8ms +/- 1.9%
    cube:               132.2ms +/- 2.4%
    morph:              144.6ms +/- 4.1%
    raytrace:           138.0ms +/- 0.6%

  access:               520.4ms +/- 4.1%
    binary-trees:        78.6ms +/- 11.3%
    fannkuch:           231.4ms +/- 2.0%
    nbody:              149.2ms +/- 8.1%
    nsieve:              61.2ms +/- 3.9%

  bitops:               449.6ms +/- 2.4%
    3bit-bits-in-byte:   69.8ms +/- 9.6%
    bits-in-byte:        99.2ms +/- 4.6%
    bitwise-and:        167.2ms +/- 2.3%
    nsieve-bits:        113.4ms +/- 6.7%

  controlflow:           91.2ms +/- 4.7%
    recursive:           91.2ms +/- 4.7%

  crypto:               247.2ms +/- 2.3%
    aes:                 81.2ms +/- 2.5%
    md5:                 83.8ms +/- 4.6%
    sha1:                82.2ms +/- 2.0%

  date:                 306.4ms +/- 0.5%
    format-tofte:       146.6ms +/- 1.4%
    format-xparb:       159.8ms +/- 1.0%

  math:                 454.8ms +/- 1.3%
    cordic:             174.4ms +/- 1.6%
    partial-sums:       193.8ms +/- 1.2%
    spectral-norm:       86.6ms +/- 4.4%

  regexp:               209.6ms +/- 0.7%
    dna:                209.6ms +/- 0.7%

  string:               674.8ms +/- 2.2%
    base64:             103.8ms +/- 9.0%
    fasta:              177.0ms +/- 1.0%
    tagcloud:           136.0ms +/- 4.6%
    unpack-code:        136.0ms +/- 1.7%
    validate-input:     122.0ms +/- 2.6%

Comparing with Firefox, the overall result of this test was that it’s 4.56 times faster.

However, if we look test by test, there are areas where I feel embarrassed for Firefox.

Bitwise Operations
For example, Bit-Operation tests in Safari 3.1 are 7.7 times faster in Safari, being the case of the bitwise-AND (&) operator the worst of them, Safari performed bitwise-and’s 16 times faster than Firefox

OUCH!!

String Operations
So you’d be curious now about String operations, which is probably a lot of what goes on with Javascript, and Ajax, parsing those XML results and what not, maybe the bitwise & won’t hurt us that much given that not many programmers today are smart enough to use them for web programming.

When it comes to String operations, Safari 3.1 was 4.5 times faster than Firefox 2.

Kudos to the Safari Team, I thought there was no point in having Safari until I did this benchmark. I guess they don’t want to let go of Web Browser users, maybe they make millions every month with ad-clicks on Google generated with the search field they have at the top of the browser which is set by default to do Google search.

Once again the saying proves it self

“Competition is good”

Let’s hope this will make the Firefox team think more on Javascript improvements with the upcoming Firefox 3. Once it’s release ready, it’ll be worth it running this benchmark again and see where it stands.

Update (March 20th, 2008)

I’ve made tests on Firefox 3 beta 4, You can see the results here. Tests have been made again on the same Macbook Pro. The improvements of Firefox 3 are notable, however, on the mac, Safari still wins.

Este Mashup lo encontre via un update de Huguito en Twitter.

Super sencillo, de hecho hay herramientas similares, pero para que bloggers sepan de donde vienen sus visitantes, esto es simplemente una sola pagina para que todo el mundo se registre en el mapa, es un mashup hecho con Google Maps.

Al momento de unirme no habian mas de 2000 personas registradas, vamos a ver como escala a medida que se registre mas gente.

After a good 4 hours or more, we finally found the error, it was our bad, but Firefox was helping us, Internet Explorer was keeping the standards but not reporting a warning or recovering from our fault…

We’re currently using a complex ajax call that needs to pass a bunch of variables that have been set on smarty (don’t ask why please)… to make it easy, we decided to do:

$all_smarty_variables = $smarty->get_template_vars();
$jsonString = $jsonEncode->encode($all_smarty_variables);


There’s this thing thats way better than XML to pass information about objects… its called JSON, it’s basically a way for Javascript to serialize its objects in strings, you can send and receive these strings via AJAX requests, and just eval them, or have JSON libraries on your favorite language used on the server side to unmarshall, and re-instanciate the objects that come from javascript.

So… in short words, no need for XML to send and receive objects, no more parsing crap, plus I would say the transfered data is much less. If you don’t think I’m on the right track, monitor the AJAX requests that GMail does, you’ll see some JSON action, or probably a custom implementation of google, they don’t send XML… why do that when you can send objects…

So now that I spent two paragraphs selling you JSON to do your remote procedure calls, I’ll tell you the odity.

As always everything was working fine with us doing our remote call and sending our big ass string in Firefox.

But when we tried in IE, it didnt work.

We tried adding slashes, removing slashes, htmlfying it, you name it we tried it.

After good 4 hours, we found out IE is strict about the size of URL requests done via GET (which makes sense, 1024bytes probably)…
but in any case, our (S)AJAX call worked just fine with Firefox

We went to Sajax.php and saw the following config…

$GLOBALS['sajax_request_type'] = 'GET';


So yeah, we made that a ‘POST’ request type and it worked, it was our bad.

Is this one point in favor of IE for keeping HTTP real? Is this one point in favor of Firefox developers for probably checking the request URL ’s length before doing an AJAX GET and arbitrarily changing the method to POST?

You decide.
You’re a good geek if you are still reading this, hope you feel me.