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I worked on both games and browsers, and I’ve seen this comparison being made before. Browsers are way more complex than what meets the eye. There are requirem

by kvark 4y ago

I worked on both games and browsers, and I’ve seen this comparison being made before. Browsers are way more complex than what meets the eye. There are requirements for high quality text, page consistency, lots of different content types, fine 2D graphics, network ops, and multiply low power consumption requirements on top. WebRender is somewhat a game engine. Real games are happy to cut all these corners, for the sake of bring impressive, and they mostly rely on hardware-accelerated functions.

thethirdone 4y ago
I think web browsers could get framerates on typical webpages to 180 fps if it were a priority. I have found some sites that should be renderable at super high framerates that struggled to keep an average of 60 fps. One reason that browsers aren't super fast is that it will always be possible to make a super slow site. Speeding up sites like HN is really not very important to battery life or user experience. Also the necessary complexities of the browser make it much harder to get 100% out of your hardware. I would guess that browsers are 3x slower than they could be on most CPU/GPU bound tasks.
- jdaxe 4y ago
  If there was an incentive for web devs to develop faster-loading and more responsive web pages then they would, e.g if Google search weighted those pages higher in search ranking. (they won't, because then Google would have to rank their own web apps lower)
- KronisLV 4y ago
  > I think web browsers could get framerates on typical webpages to 180 fps if it were a priority. I have found some sites that should be renderable at super high framerates that struggled to keep an average of 60 fps. Wouldn't it be better if most sites were only redrawn upon user interaction, remaining static most of the time apart from that? Think of the battery life savings!
KronisLV 4y ago
> Browsers are way more complex than what meets the eye. There are requirements for high quality text, page consistency, lots of different content types, fine 2D graphics, network ops, and multiply low power consumption requirements on top. WebRender is somewhat a game engine. Even in computer graphics you had standards like the full OpenGL and OpenGL ES, a more cut down version that was optimized for mobile devices and low power graphics processing. Over the years, in regards to the web, we had Wireless Application Protocol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol) and more recently Google AMP (though it didn't quite succeed for a variety of reasons), but apart from that we still push sites that do way too much to devices that don't have much processing power at all. I'm not saying that browsers are the problem here, but rather the way we develop web solutions as an industry is completely insane! Most sites out there could look way more minimalist and use some safe subset of HTML/CSS/JS that would be optimized for better battery use, minimal interaction while retaining a professional feel and accessible, well engineered UX. And yet, that's not what we have. I can't have 20'000 tabs open in my browser, grouped by month/year/site/arbitrary group, with full text search across all of them, retrieving the full and usable contents of them from HDD/SSD in seconds. On mobile, if I don't have a modern device and a browser like Opera, I can't even reliably open 100 tabs without everything slowing down to a crawl, especially without stuff to black trackers, ads, autoplaying videos, garbage scripts etc.

by kvark 4y ago

thethirdone 4y ago

I think web browsers could get framerates on typical webpages to 180 fps if it were a priority. I have found some sites that should be renderable at super high framerates that struggled to keep an average of 60 fps. One reason that browsers aren't super fast is that it will always be possible to make a super slow site. Speeding up sites like HN is really not very important to battery life or user experience. Also the necessary complexities of the browser make it much harder to get 100% out of your hardware. I would guess that browsers are 3x slower than they could be on most CPU/GPU bound tasks.

jdaxe 4y ago
If there was an incentive for web devs to develop faster-loading and more responsive web pages then they would, e.g if Google search weighted those pages higher in search ranking. (they won't, because then Google would have to rank their own web apps lower)
KronisLV 4y ago
> I think web browsers could get framerates on typical webpages to 180 fps if it were a priority. I have found some sites that should be renderable at super high framerates that struggled to keep an average of 60 fps. Wouldn't it be better if most sites were only redrawn upon user interaction, remaining static most of the time apart from that? Think of the battery life savings!

KronisLV 4y ago

> Browsers are way more complex than what meets the eye. There are requirements for high quality text, page consistency, lots of different content types, fine 2D graphics, network ops, and multiply low power consumption requirements on top. WebRender is somewhat a game engine. Even in computer graphics you had standards like the full OpenGL and OpenGL ES, a more cut down version that was optimized for mobile devices and low power graphics processing. Over the years, in regards to the web, we had Wireless Application Protocol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol) and more recently Google AMP (though it didn't quite succeed for a variety of reasons), but apart from that we still push sites that do way too much to devices that don't have much processing power at all. I'm not saying that browsers are the problem here, but rather the way we develop web solutions as an industry is completely insane! Most sites out there could look way more minimalist and use some safe subset of HTML/CSS/JS that would be optimized for better battery use, minimal interaction while retaining a professional feel and accessible, well engineered UX. And yet, that's not what we have. I can't have 20'000 tabs open in my browser, grouped by month/year/site/arbitrary group, with full text search across all of them, retrieving the full and usable contents of them from HDD/SSD in seconds. On mobile, if I don't have a modern device and a browser like Opera, I can't even reliably open 100 tabs without everything slowing down to a crawl, especially without stuff to black trackers, ads, autoplaying videos, garbage scripts etc.