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Who’s the Fastest Browser of Them All? Firefo...7, Safari 5 for OS X Lion


Every so often, Tom’s Hardware runs what it calls a “Web Browser Grand Prix,” putting the latest browsers through a battery of grueling benchmarks. The last throwdown took place in August, and was notable for its inclusion of a “hackintosh” computer, except that wasn’t enough for Mac-heads, who worried the results might be biased for lack of an authentic Mac in the mix.

Until today: TH just published one of its multipage, exhaustive benchmark features, pitting Chrome 16, Firefox 9, Internet Explorer 9, Opera 11 and Safari 5 against each other. The test machine? An 11-inch MacBook Air with a 1.8GHz Intel Core i7 processor running OS X Lion and Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit (via Apple’s Boot Camp) — about as apples-to-apples as you’ll get in cross-platform Mac/Windows testing.

(More : Google Demotes Itself in Its Own Search Results

The results are fascinating if you have time to comb through them, derived from what TH calls “core, observation, dated, and quarantine” tests, each keyed and weighted to reflect TH’s experience with the benchmarks and how trustworthy their results are. The tests consist of routine activities, ranging from startup times and cached or uncached page loads to each browser’s chops running stuff like Java, Silverlight, Flash and HTML5.
And the winners: On Windows 7, Firefox 9 (Safari took last place) and on OS X, Safari 5 (Firefox took last place). But here’s the interesting bound-to-be-contentious part — the overall winner was Firefox 9 on Windows 7. TH writes:
The red bars that occasionally appear in our charts denote when an OS X-based browser beats all of the Windows 7-based competition. We use the word occasionally because we only had to switch the Mac OS X green bars to red four times. That’s four out of 35 eligible charts, as opposed to the 10 out of 29 OS X earned on the Hackintosh system we used in Web Browser Grand Prix VI: Firefox 6, Chrome 13, Mac OS X Lion. While many Mac fans expected to see OS X really hammer Windows 7 on a genuine Mac, the home court advantage didn’t do Apple any favors.......................

Massively parallel computing engines inside GPUs make them ideal for a wide range of tasks in addition to graphics. But where are the applications?

In the dark ages of PC gaming, the CPU took care of most of the graphics chores. The graphics chip did just the basics: some raster operations, dedicated text modes, and such seemingly quaint tasks as dithering colors down to 256 or 16 colors. As Windows took hold, the graphics equation began to shift a bit, with some Windows bitmap operations handled by “Windows accelerators.” Then along came hardware like the 3dfx Voodoo and the Rendition V1000, and accelerated 3D graphics on the PC took off.

Now it’s coming full circle. Today’s GPUs are fully capable of running massively parallel, double-precision floating-point calculations. GPU computing allows the 3D graphics chip inside your PC to take on other chores. The GPU isn’t just for graphics anymore.
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/state_gpu_computing_cpu_dead_yet

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) if passed will drastically change the internet for the worse. This app will help you avoid SOPA supporting products to show your displeasure with the bill and help get it voted down! Read more about SOPA here.
What it is: A free android application that you can use to scan bar codes to help identify if products are either created by or intimately related to SOPA supporting companies. There are currently over 800 brands/companies on our list. The list currently being used by the application is available on our website listed below. https://market.android.com/details?id=com.boycottsopa.android

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