6 ms·

Higher is better. The analogy is speed. You want more speed. It's not a physical speed, just a benchmark number. Think of it as arbitrary units, which allows y

by tux3 3y ago

Higher is better. The analogy is speed. You want more speed. It's not a physical speed, just a benchmark number. Think of it as arbitrary units, which allows you to compare different version of browsers on the same machine.

julienwaj 3y ago
If the analogy isn't working for you, you can see the actual durations when you click on "Details".
lapcat 3y ago
> You want more speed. On the other hand, premature optimization is the root of all evil. > Think of it as arbitrary units, which allows you to compare different version of browsers on the same machine. That's precisely the problem. It's arbitrary, meaningless. Without any physical units, I don't know what's good or bad, fast or slow. And why do the scores go from 0 to 140 when the web browsers are all getting approximately 20?
- julienwaj 3y ago
  The score goes from 0 to 140 so that there's some room for when the computers will get faster. When we started working on this, all browsers were maxed at 140, so the computation got changed.
  - jeffbee 3y ago
    I thought the front page goes to 140 just because it is modeled after actual GM dashboard speedometers produced ~1960-1990, sometimes having range 0-85 MPH, or 0-140km/h in metric markets.
    - om2 3y ago
      Nothing actually stops the score from going higher than 140, it will just max out the visual dashboard at that point. On Speedometer 2, Safari on M3 Macs ended up over 500. At scores that high it’s harder to have intuition, thus the changed scale of the new test.
    - IainIreland 3y ago
      Yes. The speedometer graphic was inherited from Speedometer 2. When Speedometer 2 was released, scores were in a reasonable car-speed range. The combination of hardware and software improvements meant that early versions of Speedometer 3 (which includes a subset of Speedometer 2 tests) were consistently scoring above 140, so we adjusted the scaling factor (IIRC, by ~20x) to give plenty of room for future improvements.
- treyd 3y ago
  > On the other hand, premature optimization is the root of all evil. The web ecosystem is extremely mature and widely used. The workloads are fairly well understood. It is a magic unit, but the factors that go into it have a lot of thought from real-world scenarios. Bringing up "premature optimization" is completely irrelevant because that's not what this is, it's about as far as you can get from that.
  - lapcat 3y ago
    > that's not what this is, it's about as far as you can get from that. I don't know what it is. How exactly does the score relate to the experience of the web browser user? I'm a browser extension developer, and I've occasionally had people ask me about Speedometer scores, but I have no idea what they're supposed to mean or what to tell these people.
    - Vinnl 3y ago
      They say something about the speed of the browser, so it doesn't really make sense to ask extension developers about it, I don't think. Possibly that your extension might make the browser slower, so you could compare scores with and without the extension and see whether it negatively affects performance? (Although I'm not sure it can necessarily tell you anything about to what extent it affects performance, only that it does.)
      - lapcat 3y ago
        > Although I'm not sure it can necessarily tell you anything about to what extent it affects performance Exactly.
    - om2 3y ago
      Speedometer measures web app responsiveness. Roughly, it simulates a series of user operations on web apps built with various frameworks (as well as vanilla JS), and measures the time it takes to complete them and paint the results to the screen. The score is a rescaled version of inverse time - if it goes up, that implies the browser can handle more user operations per second, or alternately, it takes fewer milliseconds to complete a user operation in a complex web app.

by tux3 3y ago

julienwaj 3y ago

If the analogy isn't working for you, you can see the actual durations when you click on "Details".

lapcat 3y ago

> You want more speed. On the other hand, premature optimization is the root of all evil. > Think of it as arbitrary units, which allows you to compare different version of browsers on the same machine. That's precisely the problem. It's arbitrary, meaningless. Without any physical units, I don't know what's good or bad, fast or slow. And why do the scores go from 0 to 140 when the web browsers are all getting approximately 20?

julienwaj 3y ago
The score goes from 0 to 140 so that there's some room for when the computers will get faster. When we started working on this, all browsers were maxed at 140, so the computation got changed.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  I thought the front page goes to 140 just because it is modeled after actual GM dashboard speedometers produced ~1960-1990, sometimes having range 0-85 MPH, or 0-140km/h in metric markets.
  - om2 3y ago
    Nothing actually stops the score from going higher than 140, it will just max out the visual dashboard at that point. On Speedometer 2, Safari on M3 Macs ended up over 500. At scores that high it’s harder to have intuition, thus the changed scale of the new test.
  - IainIreland 3y ago
    Yes. The speedometer graphic was inherited from Speedometer 2. When Speedometer 2 was released, scores were in a reasonable car-speed range. The combination of hardware and software improvements meant that early versions of Speedometer 3 (which includes a subset of Speedometer 2 tests) were consistently scoring above 140, so we adjusted the scaling factor (IIRC, by ~20x) to give plenty of room for future improvements.
treyd 3y ago
> On the other hand, premature optimization is the root of all evil. The web ecosystem is extremely mature and widely used. The workloads are fairly well understood. It is a magic unit, but the factors that go into it have a lot of thought from real-world scenarios. Bringing up "premature optimization" is completely irrelevant because that's not what this is, it's about as far as you can get from that.
- lapcat 3y ago
  > that's not what this is, it's about as far as you can get from that. I don't know what it is. How exactly does the score relate to the experience of the web browser user? I'm a browser extension developer, and I've occasionally had people ask me about Speedometer scores, but I have no idea what they're supposed to mean or what to tell these people.
  - Vinnl 3y ago
    They say something about the speed of the browser, so it doesn't really make sense to ask extension developers about it, I don't think. Possibly that your extension might make the browser slower, so you could compare scores with and without the extension and see whether it negatively affects performance? (Although I'm not sure it can necessarily tell you anything about to what extent it affects performance, only that it does.)
    - lapcat 3y ago
      > Although I'm not sure it can necessarily tell you anything about to what extent it affects performance Exactly.
  - om2 3y ago
    Speedometer measures web app responsiveness. Roughly, it simulates a series of user operations on web apps built with various frameworks (as well as vanilla JS), and measures the time it takes to complete them and paint the results to the screen. The score is a rescaled version of inverse time - if it goes up, that implies the browser can handle more user operations per second, or alternately, it takes fewer milliseconds to complete a user operation in a complex web app.