Safari Browser May Soon Be Just As Fast As Chrome With WebP Integration (thenextweb.com) 105
An anonymous reader writes from a report via The Next Web: The Safari browser included in Apple's iOS 10 and macOS Sierra software is testing WebP, technology from Google that allows developers to create smaller, richer images that make the web faster. Basically, it's a way for webpages to load more quickly. The Next Web reports: "WebP was built into Chrome back at build 32 (2013!), so it's not unproven. It's also used by Facebook due to its image compression underpinnings, and is in use across many Google properties, including YouTube." Microsoft is one of the only major players to not use WebP, according to CNET. It's not included in Internet Explorer and the company has "no plans" to integrate it into Edge. Even though iOS 10 and macOS Sierra are in beta, it's promising that we will see WebP make its debut in Safari latest this year. "It's hard to imagine Apple turning away tried and true technology that's found in a more popular browser -- one that's favored by many over Safari due to its speed, where WebP plays a huge part," reports The Next Web. "Safari is currently the second most popular browser to Chrome." What's also interesting is how WebP isn't mentioned at all in the logs for Apple's Safari Technology Preview.
Middle out (Score:3)
no it uses Middle Out which was inspired by ...
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"Microsoft is one of the only major players to "
What does that mean ?
How about putting in the full context which was "Microsoft is one of the only major players to not use WebP".
Looks pretty obvious to me.
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Patented up the wazoo. Might as well use JPEG 2000 then. Guess why JPEG 2000 was never popular?
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The HEVC patent pools (plural!) are probably what's blocking adoption of BPG, which is based on an HEVC I-frame. But which royalty-bearing patent sidelined JPEG 2000?
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It uses wavelet compression. It's a patent and litigation minefield.
Quadrature mirror filters (Score:2)
It uses wavelet compression.
"Wavelet" is just a fancy name for quadrature mirror filters (QMF) [wikipedia.org]. The ATRAC codec in MiniDisc audio used QMF back in 1992, making it prior art for general QMF patents expiring before 2013. Or are there more specific patents for use of QMF in images?
It's a patent and litigation minefield.
Each mine has a seven-digit number attached to it. Which numbers apply to the use of wavelets in JPEG 2000?
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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I don't have that Windows 10 trash, but in terms of initial startup, IE 11 on Windows 7 wins by a mile on my machines (SSD, 2xSSD in RAID 0). I noticed this recently, and I'm not sure what caused it. IE 11 used to take forever to start up, just a few months ago. It's even faster than opening a new window when FF or Chrome are running.
For actually rendering sites, they're all a shitshow until you block ads and third party cookies, and only allow whitelisted javascript.
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Let me guess. Microsoft has done its usual trick of preloading it in the background and showing you the application window when you 'start' it up...
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Unless this was done in a security (and not "optional" or "recommended") update in the last few months, that's not it. There's a marked change in initial start times compared to a few months ago and I've only installed the actual security updates on these 2 machines.
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Edge loads the ads. Chrome with Adblock loads the "disable your adblocker or sign up for a subscription" page. How can the cost of a subscription be converted to energy?
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but is it faster or more efficient than Edge? I mean, spartan is the render engine to beat nowadays. MicroSoft said so.
(*waits for angry mob with torches and pitchforks*)
Microsoft does have a very good PR department that can convince the gullible plebian that anything they do is for the good of their users. Sort of like the Inquisitors of old, except now they are protecting the god fearing mob (er! users) from those open source magicians who are trying to lead the faithful away from the Microsoft light..
Here is a simple test anyone can perform. Got to this site [html5test.com] and just run their simple html5 test in the web browser of your choice. Yes even "Edge" if you are so inclined
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Any video codec can in theory be turned into a still image codec by wrapping a new container around a keyframe's bitstream. JPEG is similar to MPEG-1/2, WebP is based on VP8, and BPG is based on HEVC.
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A perfect fit for Facebook, no?
and yet already bested by FLIF (Score:1)
FLIF improves on webp by another 14%.
Hope it stabilizes soon.
http://flif.info/ [flif.info]
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Someone was mentionning BPG as well.
Besting for compression is usually a very relative term as there is a tradeoff between quality, file size, compression time and decompression time.
Now I haven't done any particular research on compression but all the things I read about FLIF and BPG only talked about filesize and quality. This is only part of the equation. Is there more result on this issue ?
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Only with video does complexity become a practical concern. With a few still images on a web page, even the lowest-end CPUs around can decode them instantly. In fact the speed-up you get from the lesser bandwidth required more than makes up for a little more decoding time.
WebP is an image file format! (Score:5, Informative)
WebP is a freaking image file format, its that freaking simple. I mean 500 words of bullshit about "technology from Google that allows developers to create smaller, richer images that make the web faster.",
Literally all they had to say was WebP is like JPG except it compresses more. Thats it, no need to say anything else.
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Does it help monitor what images you view so google can show you the most relevant ads?
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No but it does help improve the picture quality of tinfoil hats when browsing online.
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And as an image file format, it doesn't mean dick unless the web site serves up WebP format images.
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And as an image file format, it doesn't mean dick unless the web site serves up WebP format images.
Or your ISP recompresses the images for you (not that they using webP yet).
Why don't we just make the pages smaller? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry Mr. Went To School For Web Design, but the moving pull-down menus and dynamic sliding content and whatnot is just not needed (except to justify your career). When I visit a website, all I really need are maybe four buttons: "BUY OUR SHIT", "DOWNLOAD UPDATES FOR OUR SHIT", "READ DOCUMENTATION ABOUT OUR SHIT", and "CONTACT US FOR ALL THE INFORMATION ABOUT OUR SHIT WE CAN'T BE BOTHERED TO PUT ON OUR WEB SITE".
Skip all the embedded activity tracking, metrics, demographics and dynamic content and we could go back to the golden days when web pages were under a megabyte on average without images.
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The activity tracking is used to determine which SHIT to recommend that each visitor BUY.
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golden days when web pages were under a megabyte on average without images
I remember being told that an image should never have more than 8KB, less if it's only a minor element.
That megabyte per page becomes far less negligible when you, say, need to visit just your bank's page when abroad (over international roaming) and a single visit (several subpages, 7MB total) sets you back $100. Now think about kids in rural Africa connecting their donated OLPCs.
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International travel is a luxury. To save money compared to what your carrier charges for international roaming, you could find Wi-Fi, or you could whip out your passport (for ID pursuant to applicable know-your-customer laws) and buy a burner SIM for each country to which you travel.
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macOS also has a hosts file. I haven't tried it in Wine, but I'm assuming it'll work because I don't think Delphi programs to manipulate text exercise any obscure Win32 behaviors.
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Where's a good place to try things on a Mac without owning one?
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A hosts file is adequate if you have just a handful of addresses, but it really slows you down if you get more. It's read from disk and parsed every time you resolve anything. Linearly. You really want to run a local DNS server that stores the data in a proper data structure. A zone file can also block a whole domain while a hosts file is limited to a single hostname per entry.
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It's read from disk and parsed every time you resolve anything. ...
Which means it is in RAM
while a hosts file is limited to a single hostname per entry.
Which it is actually not!
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It's read from disk and parsed every time you resolve anything. ...
Which means it is in RAM
Yeah, page cache, but this wasn't what I'm talking about. On a modern SSD the speedup from in-RAM caching isn't that massive anymore -- and unless you mounted noatime, there's a write for every operation anyway, both to the journal and inode. And then you still need to read the file and parse it to find that entry; in the most likely case, ie, a non-blocked hostname, you'll need to parse the entire file.
while a hosts file is limited to a single hostname per entry.
Which it is actually not!
You can have multiple entries per line, like this:
0.0.0.0 facebook.com plus.google.com twatter.com g
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and unless you mounted noatime, there's a write for every operation anyway, both to the journal and inode.
But that is asynchrony from the event reading the info.
Anyway: there is no reason that a DNS implementation is faster as it has the same limitations regarding disk access.
but a single entry applies only to a hostname, not to the entire domain below it. :D
That is interesting. Don't even know if I never knew that or simply forgot it
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Anyway: there is no reason that a DNS implementation is faster as it has the same limitations regarding disk access.
A DNS server reads zone files just once, at startup. It can do so because it has a means of getting notified of updates (rndc, zone notifies). The data is then stored in an efficient data structure that takes O(1) to find an entry (or O(k) where k is domain's length if we care about this factor, it's sharply bounded). Even without file access inefficiencies, the best a hosts file can do is O(n) (O(n*k)) -- and we can't ignore such inefficiencies, as reading and parsing a file takes ages.
(Some server impl
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Agreed.
But if you would put in numbers for the n's and k's and what the O calculus omits, lots of c's for the calculations you would figure: it makes no sense to to set up an DNS server for a private person just to block some domains or hosts.
but that's good enough to still beat a hosts file by orders of magnitude.) /. already needs 10 seconds to load, what would I care about 1 second delay? When I have
If that is just a factor of ten, and the time delay is below 1ms, who cares? Or even 1 second, who cares?
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It's read from disk and parsed every time you resolve anything. Linearly.
Hosts data, like all other data, is loaded from disk initially but read from RAM once cached (far faster)
KiloByte's point is that the OS's hosts lookup is O(n), while a purpose-built local DNS server that reads a hosts file can manage O(log(n)) using explicit cache data structures. The speedup when you resolve a site outside your top 50 can outweigh the slowdown for switching in and out of kernel mode. And it'd have the same security benefits as your hosts file, plus the ability to use wildcards.
As fast? You have things backwards (Score:3)
On Macs I use Safari first, Chrome second and Chrome only on Windows. Safari runs circles around Chrome, so I definately wouldn't like Safari becoming "as fast as Chrome" as it would indicate making it slower than it currently is.
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Safari's is much faster for Javascript-heavy pages. The only advantage WebP would bring is that Safari could download smaller files, so in principle present the page a bit earlier than with other file formats.
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Interesting. On multiple [digitaltrends.com] benchmarks [makeuseof.com] Chrome appears to be faster where it counts - Javascript performance, network performance, rendering speed. It's also better, in terms of standards compliance and accurate rendering.
If Safari really is "running rings" around Chrome on MacOS, that suggests that Apple is either favouring Safari somehow (like Microsoft did by pre-loading a lot of IE on Windows) or crippling Chrome somehow (like they do on iOS by forcing it to use a slower version of Apple's HTML/JS engine).
WebP comparison (Score:5, Interesting)
For those interested, I recently setup a comparison [xiph.org] between different image formats, including WebP, Daala, BPG and JPEG.
We want WebM not just WebP, Apple... (Score:5, Interesting)
WebP support is nice, but pretty trivial. It's WebM (video) support that everyone has been asking Apple to add, for years now. You can bet iPhone users would like smaller YouTube videos, WebRTC video conferencing, etc., but Apple is holding-on tight to H.264 AVC as the only available video compression format. Any coincidence that they are among the companies earning patent royalties from patent licensing the format?
Apple is the one big hold out, preventing adoption of better, open and free video formats on the web. Though WebP is somewhat related, it doesn't get us any closer to WebM and the open web, which Apple is single-handedly holding-up. Absolutely every other major tech company has thrown their support behind the Alliance for Open Media.
See:
- http://pipedot.org/story/2015-... [pipedot.org]
- http://pipedot.org/story/2016-... [pipedot.org]
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How many phones have hardware support for WebM? Without hardware support, it will be worse on battery life than H.264.
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Hardware acceleration only improves battery life by "up to 36%". That's not terribly significant. - http://blog.webmproject.org/20... [webmproject.org]
The power consumption of your screen still dominates. And that benchmark seems to be the best-case, with local media. So the savings from a smaller file being received over the cellular or WiFi radios will offer some incidental power savings for the WebM case, cutting even that modest 36% number down by a
Re: We want WebM not just WebP, Apple... (Score:2)
36% insignificant? That's the difference between 3 hours and four hours of video.
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Yep, not terribly significant. Smartphones already don't last for entire days without top-up charges in-between, so making that a little bit worse will go almost unnoticed. People are already tethered to the wall (or a battery bank) if they use their phone that extensively.
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An incomplete list of those "FOSStards" includes:
Adobe, Amazon, AMD, ARM, Ateme, Cisco, Google, Intel, Ittiam, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, NVIDIA, Vidyo, and the IETF.
http://aomedia.org/about-us/ [aomedia.org]
Also supporting/enabling WebM are:
Broadcom, Marvell, Mediatek, MStar, Realtek, Rockchip, Qualcomm, Samsung, SigmaDesigns, STMicroelectronics, Hisilicon, Sony, LG, Roku, HiSense, Philips, Westinghouse, Allwinner, Texas Instruments, and many more.
http://wiki.webmprojec [webmproject.org]
Apple doesn’t play catchup with Chrome (Score:2)
Safari and Chrome may have been derived from WebKit at one point. But they’ve since diverged quite a lot. Google Docs in particular caused severe memory leaks in WebKit. Those were fixed in Chrome, but Apple has never imported those fixes, so Safari web content processes will eventially eat all your memory if you leave Google Docs open for a long time.