Rendering question

[bighairydog]

OK, I'm confused. Loads of threads, e.g. one in this forum now about a wired article talk about slower or faster rendering of pages, and about how chimera renders so fast etc...

What I want to know, is what is this rendering thing? As I understand it, rendering is the process of turning downloaded HTML and images into a nice looking page. When I open locally stored pages, so the time lag is only due to rendering, it takes between 1/2 and 1 second for a complex HTML-heavy page like a macosx.com forum page, none of that 10 second crap that wired claim.

Either can someone point me to a page that takes 10 seconds to render, or is this rendering thing being confused with downloading time? I'm sure I've *never* had a page that took that long to render, has anybody else?

(BTW, I'm on a DP 800 G4, for the purposes of comparing your machine's speed to)

Bernie :o)

[dricci]

Rendering is formating the page's HTML into what we see as a page.

The only pages I've ever had problems with is very java intense sites or sites with huge image file sizes and non-standard HTML.... Other than that, just about every page renders within 2 seconds in Mozilla for me. What were they doing these tests on? An SE?

[bighairydog]

They say they're on an 800MHz new iMac, using "MacOS X's standard web browser" i.e. IE. However, I use MicroSloth IE as my default browser, and get no long rendering times.

Bernie :o)

[dricci]

I think we should all do speed tests of the more popular sites in all of the OS X browsers and send in our results to the Editor. There is something majorly flawed in their tests. Maybe they were using a 56k to AOL?

[googolplex]

IE is pretty slow compared to chimera and mozilla, but it isn't *that* slow. I think this guy probably tested it on a original imac with hardly any ram and a 56k connection. Ignore the FUD. Mac browsers are generally a little slower, but I think that is only because they haven't been optimized as much, mozilla has been optimized thus its speed.

[vanguard]

As mentioned above., rendering is the process of converting a large string (HTML) into viewable web page. Typically, pages with a lot of tables and embedded tables take longer to render.

This page: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0...79&threshold=0
took 13 seconds on my iceBook 500 under Mozilla RC1.

For comparison, IE took 58 seconds. Under each browser the CPU was pinned at 100%.

Chimera took 16 seconds.

Anyway, all of these times suck. IE on my 600mhz P3 running W2K takes three seconds or less. This speed problem is my main complaint against my mac.

[googolplex]

6 seconds here on chimera on an icebook 500 with 386 megs of ram and DSL.

[LordOphidian]

Mozilla (0.9.9) on Linux screams.

That link took 4.145 seconds to render fully.

Pages for this site usualy take on the order of 1.6 seconds, and I have only had a few pages take longer than 10. Waits that long are usually due to images or object includes that time out.

I would be realy nice if we had a browser on OS X that could get these rendering times, but you know what, it doesn't really matter to me. I care more that it doesn't take too long, and that the page is readable and layed out correctly.