Broadband speed with different browsers!

[tiecollector]

I've actually never compiled my own version of firefox.

 

[rnoldh]

Originally Posted by briancl

If you are really ambitious about the speed of your web browser, google "tete009" and use some of his highly optimized firefox builds/dll's.

I went to the site as you suggested, but I don't think I know enough to fool with it.

I can just envision a huge crash or a problem popping up!

In layman's terms, what does tete009's software do?

 

[tiecollector]

Doesn't look like it comes with an installer you can double click. Even I would be hesitant to try to install it.

What the custom compiles do, essentially, is optimizes the machine code for your CPU (pentium 4, 3, 2, G4, etc). The Intel CPUs can perform many of the same operations but some have special features. The newer they are, the more features Intel will tack onto them.

Here is how it works in a nutshell.

Basically, the way a program works is that you have source code that is written by a human and then a compiler (such as Visual C++, as listed on that site) converts it to machine-readable code so that you can double click it and it can run. Some programming languages are "interpreted" (not compiled off the bat), such as HTML which your browser uses, but it is much slower to do things this way.

So, every computer has a hardware platform of some sort, most are on Intel or AMD CPUs, even OS X now. Every CPU has its own "instruction set" and the compiler will read the code and compile it based on the CPUs instruction set. This is one of the reasons why you can't run windows programs on OS X (mine is a G4 by Motorola), etc.

The reason Intel and AMD both work is because AMD is an Intel clone and was designed as such to compete. All these CPUs, Pentium 3, Pentium 4, etc all have their own special functions, but they are also backwards compatible, meaning programs compiled on a Pentium 4 should also work on a Pentium 2... no easy feat for Intel. In doing so, you have some generic code that will work on any Intel chip.

On that site, he compiles for specific CPUs to take advantage of special features like MMX, SSE, etc. Not all CPUs have these special instructions that are meant to speed certain operations up. A good compiler will be able to optimize code in different ways. One way is to take advantage of the special operations, which usually you can specify with a good compiler. Other ways compilers try to optimize code is to re-order you logic to use fewer instructions, or less memory, etc. Gaming programmers used to try and tweak the compiled code by hand to get performance boosts, but compilers are so good now that it is difficult to win against the compiler and oftentimes not worth the hassle.

Originally Posted by rnoldh

I went to the site as you suggested, but I don't think I know enough to fool with it.

I can just envision a huge crash or a problem popping up!

In layman's terms, what does tete009's software do?

 

[briancl]

Originally Posted by tiecollector

Doesn't look like it comes with an installer you can double click. Even I would be hesitant to try to install it.

What the custom compiles do, essentially, is optimizes the machine code for your CPU (pentium 4, 3, 2, G4, etc). The Intel CPUs can perform many of the same operations but some have special features. The newer they are, the more features Intel will tack onto them.

Here is how it works in a nutshell.

Basically, the way a program works is that you have source code that is written by a human and then a compiler (such as Visual C++, as listed on that site) converts it to machine-readable code so that you can double click it and it can run. Some programming languages are "interpreted" (not compiled off the bat), such as HTML which your browser uses, but it is much slower to do things this way.

So, every computer has a hardware platform of some sort, most are on Intel or AMD CPUs, even OS X now. Every CPU has its own "instruction set" and the compiler will read the code and compile it based on the CPUs instruction set. This is one of the reasons why you can't run windows programs on OS X (mine is a G4 by Motorola), etc.

The reason Intel and AMD both work is because AMD is an Intel clone and was designed as such to compete. All these CPUs, Pentium 3, Pentium 4, etc all have their own special functions, but they are also backwards compatible, meaning programs compiled on a Pentium 4 should also work on a Pentium 2... no easy feat for Intel. In doing so, you have some generic code that will work on any Intel chip.

On that site, he compiles for specific CPUs to take advantage of special features like MMX, SSE, etc. Not all CPUs have these special instructions that are meant to speed certain operations up. A good compiler will be able to optimize code in different ways. One way is to take advantage of the special operations, which usually you can specify with a good compiler. Other ways compilers try to optimize code is to re-order you logic to use fewer instructions, or less memory, etc. Gaming programmers used to try and tweak the compiled code by hand to get performance boosts, but compilers are so good now that it is difficult to win against the compiler and oftentimes not worth the hassle.


This is generally what most of the custom builds do. You can get stuff more along the lines of point and click installers from the "3rd party builds" forum at www.mozillazine.org. Those forums were my gateway to the highly optimized builds and coupled DLL's that tete009 offers. His stuff is actually above and beyond simple CPU instruction set and compiler optimizations on the firefox.exe, as he actually has rebuilt the supporting DLL's as well. The speed difference is certainly non-trivial.

Also, for a few basic tweaks, check out http://www.tweakguides.com/Firefox_1.html. The config tweaks will speed up a lot of basic surfing related tasks for average users.

 

[Artisan Fan]

I find Safari is the fastest browser on my machines at home.