Update: I decided to throw IE8 into the mix just to see how that played out.

Chrome 5.0.375.38 beta vs. FireFox 3.7a5 “Minefield”

Cold start with 10 tabs (cnn.com):

~ About the test: done three minutes after a reboot of the OS. Both browsers, after having a cleared cache, were required to open ten tabs of the website http://cnn.com. This site was chosen due to high amounts of ads. The time was measured from clicking the browser shortcut until all page-loading icons disappeared. Lower is better.

IE = 25s
Firefox = 32s
Chrome = 50s

Surprisingly, IE performed twice as quickly as Chrome on a cold start. Firefox followed closely behind though, trailing IE by just seven seconds.

Warm start with 10 tabs (cnn.com):

~ About the test: Both browsers were started just after the cold start test. They were required to open the same tabs in the same quantities. Again, the time was measured from clicking the shortcut until all page-loading icons disappeared. Lower is better.

Firefox = 3.5s
Chrome = 8s
IE = 15s

Minefield easily won, being over twice as fast as Chrome, and about four times as fast as IE.

Go under the cut for the rest of the tests…

Memory test, after starting with 10 tabs (cnn.com):

~ About the test: The three browsers were restarted with 10 tabs of CNN.com.  Their memory usage was measured. To find Chrome’s total memory usage, the usage amounts from all of its tabs/processes were added. Lower is better.

Firefox = 73k
Chrome = 156k
IE = 288.7k

For the second time in a row, Minefield is the winner! Using 46% of the memory Chrome did, this browser seems to be coming out on top a lot. However, IE’s performance was sad at best here, using almost twice the memory of Chrome, and almost four times that of Minefield…

Memory test, after closing all but one tab (cnn.com):

~ About the test: This was performed immediately after the last test – all but one of the cnn.com tabs were closed, and the memory usage was measured. Again, Chrome’s usage was measured by adding up the usage amounts of all of its tabs. Lower is better.

Chrome: 47k
Firefox: 63k
IE: 178k

Chrome wins for once! This is probably because Chrome’s tab processes end completely when closed, whereas Firefox retains parts of the closed tabs in memory until it garbage-collects. For the second time, IE’s performance is simply embarrassing. It performed almost four times worse than Chrome, and almost three times worse than Minefield.

Conclusion

From these results, it is clear that Minefield is the faster, less memory-intensive browser of the three.

Author’s note: Minefield had one add-on, NoScript (this was set to “Allow Scripts Globally” throughout the entire test, so it did NOT block the ads on CNN, or any other scripts that may have caused the pages to load more slowly). Chrome had no extensions. Therefore, in a slightly more balanced test, Minefield would have the potential to outperform Google Chrome and Internet Explorer even more greatly.
In addition, you should keep in mind that this may not apply to your versions of these browsers; this test was performed using the latest development releases of both Firefox and Chrome. (However, the latest stable release of IE was used because the IE9 Preview is not the full browser.)

Most details on the Leo haven’t been figured out yet, since only the i9 has been fully tested. However, it’s interesting that the i9 will be built using 32nm processor architecture, based on Westmere (found in the Core i3 processor), but AMD continues to use 45nm architecture, à la Nehalem.

Six cores seems nice and all, but I don’t see the practical applications for a desktop environment. True, the Core i9 performs up to 50% better than the Core i7 with high-end operations such as 3D modeling and video rendering, but most end-user tasks are unaffected. It is more power-saving and doesn’t heat up as much, but with an estimated price tag of $1000 to $1200 dollars, there isn’t much to be gained for desktop users.

Where this really starts to get interesting in servers. Recall that the Core i9 shows an extremely high performance increase (up to 50%) in tasks suited to parallelization, and especially so in servers. Expect big websites to be moving to Core i9 servers as soon as it’s released.

Footnote: I’m aware of the correct usage of “à la”, and also that Nehalem architecture was used by Intel, not AMD, but for the purposes of comparison it seemed appropriate.

In other news, I’ve been working on Evan for two days now, and I’ve gotten him to level 31 (not much, but I was trying to enjoy the class.) Here’s how he looks so far:

- xXxPlatinum and Mir casting various skills. (By the way, I play in Khaini if you want to add me.)

The class seems really fun. The low speed gets me down a bit, but the attacks seem devastating. Until today I thought my Evan would be my new main… but wait, nothing’s perfect. I recently discovered the following fact:

Level 6 and above: Mastery book required. Guess where the mastery book is?

That’s right. So let me get this straight: NexAm just took a mage’s most important survival skill, lowered the max level to five, and created a 2,000 NX cash item that will allow you to take it higher? This is pathetic.

I have to say, it’s only 2k NX, so it’s fine for the people whose accounts can actually charge NX cash, but sadly mine can’t. Every time I try to charge PayPal it simply errors out, telling me to re-login. I submitted a support ticket to NexAm. Guess what? No response. I wish I could play KMS.

The rationale, and some speculation:

A little while ago I read this blog post by spadow: http://spadow.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/kmst-v303-new-jobs-accuracy-avoidability-back-to/

The new job IDs, as you can see, are 3000, 3211, 3212, 3311, 3312, 3511, and 3512. I decided to examine the patterns in some other MapleStory jobs. Each job ID is four characters long (for adventurers, you just add a leading zero), and each digit denotes a certain aspect of the job.

• The first number tells you which class group the job is in: 0 means Adventurers, 1 means Cygnus Knights, 2 means Heroes, and 3 is the new ID that Nexon has added to the .wz files of kMST.
• The second digit denotes what “type” of class it is, i.e. 0 is Beginner, 1 is Warrior, 2 is Mage, 3 is Archer, 4 is Rogue, and 5 is Pirate.
• The third digit denotes the “branch” of the job. For example, Ice/Lightning, Fire/Poison, and Cleric are all branches of the Adventurer mage (02xx).
• The final number denotes which “stage of advancement” the job is in, i.e. second, third, or fourth job.

When examining these IDs, it was easy to tell that it would be a totally new class group, but because the second digits only included 0, 2, 3, and 5, there would only be Beginner, Mage, Archer, and Pirate classes. The beginner class only has one branch, just like all other beginner classes in the game. However, I discovered something extremely similar between the remaining three classes that links them heavily to the Cygnus Knights… Each of them only had one branch (every time, the third digit was a 1) and each of them only has two advancements after the branch – just like Knights of Cygnus!

This is amazing! In fact, at the end of this article, Spadow posted part of a Q&A with Nexon. Guess what it said?

“Q: How many characters can we expect?
A: Two characters are already prepared. One character is a Hero and the other character is related to the Black Magician.”

Related to the Black Mage, and parallel to the Cygnus Knights – to me, that only means one thing. The Black Magician’s henchmen. The Villains.

Also, GGF got a new skin (base: BF_Vista. base’s base: subsilver2), and I’m currently in the process of making a l33t (1337) language pack for users. Finally…

</rant>

In other news, I’ve devised an XML language for taking notes. Yeah, you heard right. It probably has no practical use other than being both human-readable and machine-readable, though once I add graph/MathML support it’ll be cooler than Word.

In yet another collection of news, I beat Plants vs. Zombies today (on my iPod Touch).

In completely different news, I’m still debating whether or not to resume work on Gyzer v1. I’m also debating whether or not to start up on GGF again.

Did you hate the layout of that post? I did.

On another note, four-day weekend! That means tons of updates to SlimeRevamped!

I renewed officialgms.com, which should be back up by Thursday.

One of my new domains is slimerevamped.com, which will soon be home to slime volleyball-inspired games (including my own mods).

The other is gyzer.net, which ties into my dropping gyzer.com due to it being bought out by a domain squatter.

My final dropped domain is favico.us. This will expire soon and I will not be renewing it.

Twenty-eight levels now, guys. Keep going at it.

For those of you who don’t know what MM’s LP is, you can find it here.