The Browser Marks: Gauging Performance for PPC Browsers

[Jubadub]

If you are old enough to have grown up with an Amiga you wouldn’t think that. If you are a young buck that grew up with Windows or OS X, then i can see your point. For us older folks, MorphOS’s Ambient desktop mimics Amiga’s WorkBench and feels 100% natural.

Or old enough to have grown up with Mac OS (the actual thing, not X).

Glad to hear it is good enough to quench the thirst for Amigans, though. (And Atarians?)

@repairedCheese Classilla, and far older browsers, will let you get stuff from the Garden. There's also FTP for it (and maybe even Gopher in the future?). You can even use ultra-light browsers like WannaBe, or MacLynx.

It's neat if we can get more up-to-date browsers feature-wise, but that should be nothing beyond an extra. Much of the current web is also bonkers and unsustainable (e.g. pointless/nonsensical HTTPS-everywhere overhead even in websites with zero user input), and much of it grew way beyond its scope (e.g. WebAssembly, general privacy invasiveness such as, among many things, DRM), so more than newer web browsers what we need is a web reform for websites to follow (Web-1.0-inspired), and any website not conforming is best "excluded" by the browser by it simply not rendering it anyway (one can consider that an advantage from older browsers in this regard -- you learn what sites are not really worth your visit), but that's another discussion to dwelve into. (Spoiler: Gopher is also awesome.)

TL;DR I get your point, but we really don't need newer browsers, even though I understand getting them made is many people's passion, and it feels good when certain websites work on your system of choice.

 

[Alubook133]

Well, until a putative web reform happens - if it ever does - we're constricted to search for the best tradeoff b/w usability and performance.
In Tiger/Leopard, we got Safari which is quite snappy but can't display 90% (give or take, a very large portion anyway) of modern web sites, which is unacceptable - while say TFF or similar browsers are able to cover 90% of modern web sites (again, wild guess but that's the idea), however take an unbearable amount of time to display complex, JavaScript laden web pages (more applications than just pages, really) in a non-very fluid manner.

Someone tells me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand the only real way to improve things significantly would be to add full GPU support to offload our machine's poor old CPU that has to handle everything including JavaScript code parsing and execution as well as video and graphics tasks. Isn't that right ?

 

[Jubadub]

Someone tells me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand the only real way to improve things significantly would be to add full GPU support to offload our machine's poor old CPU that has to handle everything including JavaScript code parsing and execution as well as video and graphics tasks. Isn't that right ?

That could help. What also helps is to leverage SIMD processing in processors that have it, especially in the G4s (G5 also counts). Other than that, code and compiler optimizations, and/or hand-written assembly code, either inline or pure assembly. A lot of the hardware goes to waste even with pure C compilers, both old and new, although to squeeze more juice out of the hardware than the compilers, then you really need to know your assembly. (I don't.)

As an example of pure PPC assembly beauty and what crazy performance it can yield versus plain C (and especially plain any other language/platform), look no further than Garden member "siddhartha77"'s md5classic. The code was originally written in C, source code available. Later it got updated with PPC assembly (and 68k assembly for that matter, sidd is simply a master and a wizard). You can compare the C source with the assembly source: you couldn't get the assembly-level performance no matter what manner of C code you write or compiler you use to go against it.

 

[Alubook133]

CPU code optimization for speed by a human brain VS via a C compiler (though the compiler itself is a product of a human brain too) can only help indeed, the "only" issue being the (inhuman) amount of work required to develop a browser, javascript interpreter, graphics engine etc... directly in CPU assembly code !

OTT, I don't know how much of TFF/AF/... browsers make use of the Altivec capabilities of G4/G5 processors, that would also help greatly, I suppose it's about the same amount as old FF releases support for that instruction set/coding method...

 

[Jazzzny]

The TenFourFox JIT Javascript engine is custom-written for PowerPC assembly. There is not much else that can be done for the pre-Quantum Firefox codebase, it is simply quite old and not written to be all that performant.

 

[Alubook133]

Right, so in essence you confirm what I suggested above, not much improvement to expect then (but a lot has already been done, no complaint whatsoever here, can't thank enough all the people involved in keeping our old PPC's still usable today).