[geeks] Browser speed on older Sun (was: What graphical environments ...)

[Scott Howard]

On Tue, Oct 07, 2003 at 06:41:31PM -0500, Daniel Johannsson wrote:
> I just tried Firebird on this machine, and found it to be close, but not
> quite as fast as Sun's ns7.  Perhaps Sun put some time into good
> optimization on this build, because I feel like it's about as zippy as
> ns4.  Anyone else feel that ns7 is fast on their old boxes, or am I
> imagining things?  Specs on the box are: ss10, 2 x sm51, 224mb, Sol 8 with
> all recent patches.

NS7 will generally feel faster than NS4 simply due to the way the
rendering engine works - it does a _lot_ more partial rendering than the
old version does (ie, where the page is displayed before it's finished
loading, and then the layout may change afterwards as needed).

The other factor is that the Sun release is compiled with the SunONE
computer (or whatever the hell we call it this week - it's changed again
a few weeks ago I think). Generally this gives about a 10-25% improvement
over gcc - especially if you put some effort into getting the options
right, which I'm sure they have.

Firebird with SunONE would probably be nice...

  Scott