Raspberry Pi Gets a Brand New Browser 107
sfcrazy writes The Raspberry Pi team has announced a new browser for Raspberry Pi. They had worked with Collabora to create an HTML5-capable, modern browser for Pi users. While announcing the new browser, Eben Upton said, "Eight months and a lot of hard work later, we're finally ready. Epiphany on Pi is now a plausible alternative to a desktop browser for all but the most JavaScript-heavy sites."
Re: (Score:2)
Hehe, I first read "Microsoft server" and wondered WTF...
Re:Not the correct application for this (Score:5, Funny)
No, it has nothing to do with the WWW. It has a lot to do with poorly designed web browsers written in C/C++ which leak memory like a sieve and treat memory like everything has unlimited quantities of it. A well designed web browser supporting ALL of the HTML, Javascript and other web standards could use a small fraction of what Firefox uses if it is written properly and in a better language like Ruby. With some quality programming, the web browsers could use a fraction of the CPU power they do now by storing off screen graphics in compressed formats, for instance, especially since ending up with disk caching due to using up the RAM is far more resource intensive than decompressing images. There is no reason, NO REASON that Firefox should eat up 1 GB of RAM. The Javascript and HTML engines supporting ALL of the latest standards and ALL legacy standards only take up a few MB of RAM. There is massive memory leakage going on these browsers of forgotten image and multimedia data. Observing the behaviour of Firefox it cannot be anything else, when you open 20 windows and then close all except the first one, memory never goes back down. If web browsers were written in say, Perl or Ruby, I gaurantee that you could easily have browsers that are many times faster than current browsers because the memory usage and swapping would be much less, plus would be much safer without all of the buffer overruns.
Re: Not the correct application for this (Score:2)
Had doubts wether trolling or not, but you got me at "perl".
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Not the correct application for this (Score:3)
There are weird ruby lovers out there.
Re: (Score:2)
On such example:
http://alanwalkerart.com/wp/wp... [alanwalkerart.com]
Re:Not the correct application for this (Score:5, Informative)
There is no reason, NO REASON that Firefox should eat up 1 GB of RAM.
Firefox caches images and rendered pages so that things happen reasonably fast. A 1000x1000 colur image at 24 bit is already 3M. There is no way a modern page with an image or two would fit in a few M.
Once you have 800 tabs loaded (something I tend to do) all running JS and using images all over the place, memory vanishes fast.
There are basically several problems. Yeah firefox isn't perfect and could do with some optimization. But, many websites do pointless bloaty stuff and require scads of JS and huge images just to show some text. And then there's the browsing habits.
These days I run with NoScript, and a tab unloader, and I'm picky what scripts I allow. It makes firefox usable on my 1GB netbook. It's taking up 176M at the moment. Actually it's got a bit better recently. Even with those it needed restarting to clear the ram, but now it runs substantially longer.
Re: (Score:1)
Spill it, I need to know. What if I show you mine first: I'm currently at 17.
How bad is your tab hoarding ?
Re: (Score:1)
Horseshit. I've had 1300 open. I am over 400 a large proportion of time. Not everyone is an irrelevant lightweight.
Re: (Score:1)
Do you have them open because "lulz look how many tabs I can have open"? Serious question. Because there must be tabs there you haven't looked at in months, and if they disappeared you'd never know.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"Even with those it needed restarting to clear the ram"
The first step is admitting you have a problem.
Re: (Score:3)
Web pages don't usually have 1000x1000 images, with the exception of wallpaper sites, and people sure as hell don't keep 300 tabs open with those images, to justify Firefox using 1GB+ of memory and swapping to disk... Never mind the fact that Firefox could cache the compressed version of the images, and re-render that part of the page when the tab gains focus.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know how many tabs I have open right now, probably around 500. And while most of those are mostly text, Firefox might very well keep them as full-color images to avoid re-rendering when it needs to display them.
Re: (Score:2)
Why tab unloader if FF could implement a limit? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
--Submitting personal experience, Palemoon on Linux 64-bit is beating Firefox all hollow WITH THE SAME PLUGINS running.
--In my work environment, Xubuntu 64-bit, Firefox would regularly use ~2GB+ of my 6GB of laptop RAM - and become extremely slow. I open and close tabs all night. Palemoon is *much* more memory efficient - and I haven't noticed the same slowdown effect.
--Right now I have 15 Palemoon windows open and God knows how many tabs, but one of the best changes they made to the Firefox base code is no
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Pre-rendering web pages (Score:2)
Sorry, but web pages get rendered into images before displaying them. (Though at least Firefox's semi-recent versions don't bother rendering web pages until needed when you crash&restart Firefox, which I do all the time - usually not on purpose, though I'll occasionally do it to scavenge memory or when performance has become unbearably slow.)
Re: (Score:1)
Let me get this straight.
- You suggest Ruby, which is known to be notoriously slow, would be a good choice of language to write a high-performance browser
- You suggest burning CPU cycles for compression/decompression helps save CPU cycles
- You have problems with the idea of a browser written in C/C++, but subsequently suggest using a language written in C/C++.
Either you're trolling or are so thick that you don't see your own doublethink.
Re: (Score:1)
Maybe browsers aren't as efficient as they could be, but current "web design" practices are definitely to blame for the general slowness. For example, this page (Slashdot Classic) wants to load (mostly scripts) from eight additional domains. I have a couple of web sites of my own, and they all load instantly and scroll without a hitch, even though I use scripts to enhance the presentation too, but of course I learned web design and programming in the 90s, when computers with 200MHz CPUs were still around. P
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
1) Ever heard of caching? 2) Browsers do not need to support HTML standards, but real-world HTML practices, which is messy. Such as tested by Acid2.
Re: (Score:3)
which leak memory like a sieve and treat memory like everything has unlimited quantities of it.
You have no idea what a memory leak is. None. In fact, I don't think I've ever heard a layman use the term correctly. A memory leak would lead to the application using a hell of a lot more memory than Firefox ever could in just a few seconds, if not immediately, and lead to the application faulting. And, for a point of fact, modern computers start with 8gig of memory, and then there's the page file/swap space. Effectively memory is unlimited, at least in comparison to the paltry 1 gig of memory Firefox is u
Re: (Score:1)
Bullshit. Time is no factor in the mere question of whether something leaks memory or not. If a program fails to properly release memory then it's a memory leak, whether it's one gigabyte per second, or one byte
Re: (Score:1)
I'm afraid it is you that are wrong. A memory leak just means that it is not properly cleaning up after itself i.e. releasing memory when no longer required. It does not mean that the app needs to crash. It does not mean that the app needs to keep leaking until all memory is used and it crashes for it to be a leaky app. For example clicking on the back button or some other control may cause a few bytes to be consumed that are never released because of poor programming/memory handling. This is a leak. Will the app crash? On a modern machine it is not likely as you'd have to click a lot of times in order to consume enough memory. However it does not stop it being a memory leak.
Correct. The GP was wrong.
In the case of Firefox start with one tab. Check the memory usage. Open lots of different tabs, for instance, by opening links from your favourite iGoogle style dashboard. Note the memory usage. Leave them sit there for a while. Then go through closing them down. I guarantee you that you will not get back to anywhere near the starting level. That is a memory leak by definition.
No, it is not. You gave the correct definition earlier: the app is not releasing memory which was allocated but is no longer necessary.
Without knowing how Firefox works internally it's difficult to say that closing tabs should recover that memory, but I'm going on a limb and say that it shouldn't. For one thing, you can reopen closed tabs, and they'll come back essentially as they were left, including the ability to navigate using the back button. Where do you think this informatio
Not all PCs have 8 GB of RAM (Score:2)
modern computers start with 8gig of memory
Is the ASUS Transformer Book [microsoftstore.com], a 10" convertible laptop computer, not "modern" because it ships with only 2 GB of RAM?
Besides, not all computers still in use are modern. I do most of my web browsing on a four-year-old Dell Inspiron mini 1012, a 10" laptop that came with only 1 GB of RAM and runs Xubuntu. Flashblock helps keeps Firefox below half a GB, after which point the bottleneck is not memory but the fact that Firefox uses only half of the CPU. Though an Atom has two-way simultaneous multithreading,
Re: (Score:2)
A memory leak would lead to the application using a hell of a lot more memory than Firefox ever could in just a few seconds, if not immediately,
[citation needed]
It is perfectly possible to have a slow memory leak. Saying otherwise is dumb. If the leak is in an infrequently-called routine, or simply does not occur every time the leaky routine is called, then it won't happen the way you imagine that it will.
But now memory is insanely cheap...
...except on mobile platforms, where the power budget has to be considered along with the cost of the memory. And did I mention that DDR4 costs about twice as much as DDR3?
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I blame people who have no idea that sending a 1.8MB, 3000x2000 pixels PNG is a bad idea both for the size of the file and the RAM required to store the file and the RAM required to decompress the image in order to display it. And that's only the background image of a single page.
Re: (Score:1)
With Seamonkey you can still rightclick an image and select 'Block images from url.com' and bip! Sorry, web 'designer', you failed to impress. Firefox has gone over to the darkside and doesn't have this feature. It's nice to have the images from adservers blocked so the aren't even loaded.
Re: (Score:2)
While the rest of your comment may be sarcastic, this is actually a very good idea. First, it is actually many, many times faster to recompute a value than to pull it from memory:
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Then I got to "perl". Well done. Well fucking done.
Re: (Score:1)
That doesn't necessarily mean that Firefox is leaking memory. It could mean that it is keeping it for its own reuse rather than releasing it back to the system. If the expectation is that the browser user will soon need the memory again (perhaps by opening 19 new tabs), that is likely to be more efficient than releasing it to the system pool and then later asking for it again. On the other hand, if the user next needs all that memory to run something OTHER than Firefox it's not so good.
The Chrome model of u
Awesome (Score:1)
So because they insisted on using a crappy 12-year-old design ARM11 CPU, they need a custom browser to compensate.
Why not make a Raspberry Pi model C, with a Cortex based CPU? If they used a modern A17 at 1.4Ghz, it would be just as low-power and have ~8x more performance.
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
So because they insisted on using a crappy 12-year-old design ARM11 CPU, they need a custom browser to compensate.
Why not make a Raspberry Pi model C, with a Cortex based CPU? If they used a modern A17 at 1.4Ghz, it would be just as low-power and have ~8x more performance.
Because they like to sell their the Pi's at or below $35?
Re: (Score:2)
Considering you can buy [aliexpress.com] a 7" tablet with a 1.5GHz dual core Cortex A7 with 512MB ram and 8GB flash for $38, I don't see why the Raspberry Pi, with no flash, no battery and no screen couldn't be even cheaper than $35 with a different SOC.
Re: (Score:2)
Made in China vs made in UK?
Re: (Score:2)
At least the first 10,000 Raspberry Pi's were made in China.
They didn't even start manufacturing in UK until September 2012.
They were still manufacturing in China in December 2012.
Re: (Score:2)
Well I bought 3 things from Aliexpress:
A 32gb SD card which craps out if you copy more than 2gb on it.
A set of 3w garden lights which draw just over 1.5w at full power and burn out if you even slightly raise the voltage.
A Bluetooth speaker with the beats logo which has approximately 10 min battery life.
So yes you can make anything for any price, but I'd rather buy something which works rather than something unrealistically cheap.
Re: (Score:2)
That's not an answer. That just says they made a stupid choice. Face it. Anybody with half a brain buys the BeagleBone anyway. What's an extra $10-20? One or two pizzas.
Re: (Score:2)
What's an extra $10-20? One or two pizzas.
Maybe I'd rather have the pizzas than waste money on something that I don't need?
Re: (Score:2)
What's an extra $10-20?
More than half the price of another raspberry pi.
People with brains buy a system to suit their needs. People with really good brains optimise that system to get maximum performance. Everybody else needlessly spends money on something more powerful than they need.
Re: (Score:1)
What's an extra $10-20? One or two pizzas.
(a) For me, $10-$20 is no big deal, especially since I don't need many small board computers. What about a school district that is buying Pi's in bulk? A very poor school district?
If the BeagleBone is a better deal for you, then buy that. I plan to buy that (BeagleBone Black, thank you very much). But I don't think the RPi guys are "stupid" or "made a stupid choice".
(b) If you look at the history of how the RPi got made, it was always going to be a Broadcom SOC
Re: (Score:1)
It has its place and it's not a "stupid" thing at all.
Keep in mind that this is Slashdot. As long as a product doesn't meet that autistic need for every little factor to be 100% compliant with one's personal tastes, it's a stupid waste of time.
Re: (Score:2)
But he's clearly smarter than everybody who spent years thinking of and designing an enormously successful product.
Nah, he's really a fuckwit but thanks to Dunning-Kruger he doesn't know it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Recent versions of the BeagleBone Black have 4 GB of internal flash and come with Debian pre-installed.
That being said, I have a RPi, mainly for use as a media center (one of the best uses for it).
Re: (Score:1)
It's a good thing.
Code of this lighter, faster browser for the Pi may end up in mainstream browsers, which will then be able to handle heavier, more complex, and more poorly-designed websites, which will in turn lead to an even faster, more efficient browser for the Pi.
The result after all this effort is that the Web will still be at least as slow as before, just the way we grumpy old gits like it.
Re: (Score:2)
Agree. I think there should be something between Intel NUC and R-Pi. I think R-Pi has merit in that its just enough compute and memory to do almost everything, but I think in 2014 that more can be done with $35-$50.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Apparently because the A20 boards are ~$50 they're not comparable to a Raspberry Pi, despite the Raspberry Pi being completely useless without an SD card that isn't included in the $35 because it has no onboard flash.
Re: (Score:2)
Like this MIPS attempt ? http://www.pcworld.com/article... [pcworld.com]
Or any other or wannabe rpi competitors.
An improvement (Score:5, Informative)
I'm actually using Epiphany, the new browser, to post this. Slashdot was one of the first sites I visited and co-incidentally there was an article about it right at the top! So far, it does seem to be a nice upgrade to the previous Midori browser, which I found essentially unusable.
Re: (Score:3)
Seems WebKit will have a place after Chrome and Opera's split to Blink. (This new Pi browser is Webkit)
Re: (Score:2)
It's unlikely Apple will go anywhere; Safari will keep using WebKit and it's a pretty good fraction of the mobile market.
Re: (Score:2)
On a side note, I do have the 256mb rasb-pi, so maybe it requires the 512mb version to work well?
Oh well, I just went back to playing MAME and beat "The Punisher" arcade game instead
Re: (Score:2)
call it.. (Score:1)
Lame name change (Score:1)
It's no longer called "Epiphany". In what seems like an epiphany, the GNOME developers decided that it's much, much, easier to search for help for a browser called "Web". Great idea, there, guys. Was this intentional, to prevent intelligible bug reports from less sophisticated users?
One wonders whether they actually "eat their own dog food", or if they do, if they understand that the average user of GNOME isn't a GNOME developer.
Raspberry Pi is not slow (Score:5, Insightful)
People and programmers have been spoilt by multi-GHz multi-core CPUs. People used to edit video, design space ships, simulate physics, ray trace liquid metal and just about everything else on far weaker machines. It good to see that some people can achieve good performance on limited hardware. The raspberrypi foundation are funding work all over the free software stack, which will benifit plenty of people who have never seen or used a pi.
Re: (Score:2)
The raspberrypi foundation are funding work all over the free software stack, which will benifit plenty of people who have never seen or used a pi.
Just a shame they dont promote C++. Instead, they choose Python and Scratch and blog it over everything else.
So they can optimize the OS for the Pi now, but 10 years down the line when the kids have grown up, its all for nothing.
And yes, i do agree with you, the Pi isnt slow. We are spoilt with high performance CPUs and choose to run programs made in Java/Python by amateurs who tell you that a i7 is needed.
We live in a world where simple and slow programming languages are the choice, instead of C++ and a li
Re: (Score:2)
We live in a world where there aren't enough "experts", and amateurs work for 125k/year on average in the big tech hubs.
At that point you end up having to do simple math. Is it worth it hiring the guy at 180k+/year who could do this in a way that it can run on modest hardware, or you hire the peanut gallery, who'll write maintainable code, but will do so with hardware requirements of $1000 instead of $100.
In that situation, the i7 cpu looks like a bargain.
Re: (Score:2)
Having kids that can program at all is a very good thing. I think its good to teach programming concepts in simple languages instead of throwing them in at the deep end with C/C++.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
noi that phong thi nghiem (Score:1)