On Fri, Feb 04, 2011 at 11:42:03AM +0000, Richard Porter wrote: > The NetSurf web site says: > > "Efficiency lies at the heart of the NetSurf engine, allowing it to > outwit the heavyweights of the web browser world. The NetSurf team > continue to squeeze more speed out of their code." > > I've been doing one or two comparisons on a 300MHz Kinetic RiscPC > running OS 6.16. > > Test 1 - following a link to near the bottom of a thumbnail index. > Fresco 2.13 15s > Oregano 1.10 17s > Netsurf r11515 28s > > Test 2 - following a link to the latest forum post from the "top 10" > latest posts page. > Fresco 4s (when it worked properly) > Oregano 6s > Netsurf 17s > > Now obviously there's a big advantage in coding in assembler for a > specific processor family rather than using C and making the code > portable,
I wouldn't call it an advantage. And none of the browsers you list here are written in assembler; they're all written in C. > but the main reason seems to be that NetSurf is trying to > reformat the whole page over and over again, taking note of dimensions > only after the images have been downloaded. Also, NetSurf implements *FAR MORE* of HTML and CSS than either Fresco or Oregano. The amount of work it is doing is an order of magnatude greater. > The other browsers do a > quick format observing dimensions where given, download the images and > then reformat if necessary. Oregano seems to fill in the visible part > of the window first which is a nice feature, but in the above tests I > waited for the page to finish downloading. You know where the sources are, etc... B.
