First look at Redstone 3

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When you first run the first public build of Redstone 3 — which is to say, Windows 10 build 16170 — Edge pops up with a speed diagram. See anything
[See the full post at: First look at Redstone 3]

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Shakespeare was wrong… Marketers first. 🙂

I remember as a boy growing up in the 1960s, being taught how in modern times people no longer had to worry, because we now had “truth in advertising” laws. No more “Carter’s Little Liver Pills” and the like.

Ah, for the good ol’ days when honesty and integrity were important.

This is what it SHOULD look like. Now tell me, tech fans, does this look much less impressive than the marketeer-skewed version?

-Noel

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Elly, HiFlyer, woody, BobbyB, wdburt1, Karlston

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Appreciate the historical comparison.  Because only the technology has changed.

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Noel Carboni

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Yep, it just reinforces the fact that misleading, deception, and downright lying are standard parts of Microsoft’s modus operandi.

I bet that if the Microsoft board published its financial details using such blatant deceit, financial commentators and authorities, not to mention shareholders would flay them alive. And rightly so.

Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

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Noel Carboni

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Yes, but in reality I do not notice much difference in performance.

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HiFlyer, Noel Carboni

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Marketers who don’t understand statistics…

Here’s another one that you might want to tackle, from http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/jd-power-2017-us-tablet-satisfaction-study :

Meh. Now JD Power thinks we’re stupid.

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What’s wrong with it?

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The graph’s aren’t based at zero, giving a truly distorted impression.

The difference between Samsung, Apple and Microsoft is so small (8 out of a thousand, using whatever measurements they’re employing) that the results are indistinguishable.

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Elly

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Yes – pretty much the same kind of deception being employed by the Edge ad, with the exception that in this case the left end of the graph is labeled, so possibly slightly less deceptive.

Some might say that it’s become such common practice to make differences look larger that way that everyone should be used to it and looking for it.

Marketeers would say that they are being paid to be deceptive. A fair number I’ve known routinely go so far as to lie outright on the theory that it’s better to act ignorant and ask forgiveness later…

What’s REALLY funny is that we’ve inadvertently advertised the largely bogus implication that Microsoft’s browser is faster by you publishing your article and we going about discussing it. Any news is free advertising.

An astute Marketeer somewhere (and b) are chuckling because they got us to do that.

There is virtually no substance, only buzz. Substance is much more expensive.

-Noel

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I haven’t done tests of statistical significance since retiring from my marketing research job 12 years ago and may be slightly off in my analysis, but taking the sample size of the J. D. Power report into account and converting these point scores to percentages, there is no statistical difference between the scores for Microsoft and any of the other manufacturers except for Acer and Asus. So even though the absolute values here may be reported correctly, almost all of these differences are effectively meaningless except to ad copy writers.

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Elly, satrow, Noel Carboni, woody

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Ah, for the good ol’ days when honesty and integrity were important.”

Yet, out the window that had gone.

Most followed the golden rule, but not all.

In this day and age… it’s the complete opposite.

Edited to remove HTML. Please convert to text before posting

 

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Elly, Noel Carboni

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I want an OS that could still run my applications (Win32/64 apps) with little to no tweaking, and Steam games (DirectX and OpenGL), I would switch. What would MS have to do to trust them again?

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Noel Carboni

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Please convert your Word doc to text before posting.

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Huh.  On reading your post — I just ran Octane on my primary workstation, in Firefox 52.0.2.  The browser has not been restarted for hours and had something like 20 tabs open.

Octane Score: 42020

Is that a decent score?

Edit:  here are the scores on the same machine with Chrome and Edge.  Drat, I was rooting for FF to win the race.

Chrome version 57.0.2987.133 (64-bit)
Octane Score: 46182

Edge (current for 1607)
Octane Score: 49318

Oddly, even though Edge has the highest score, it consistently loads / renders most of my daily/favorite web sites noticeably slower than FF or Chrome.  It’s especially bad on my banking sites.  Does this perhaps suggest that Edge is cheating the test?  (Not uncommon for bench marking suites to be gamed by their targets.)

~ Group "Weekend" ~

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Elly, Noel Carboni

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Workstations are great, no? 🙂

What’s interesting is that I get half the Octane 2 score out of Internet Explorer as FireFox, yet IE starts more quickly and navigates to most pages more quickly – and so to me delivers a more pleasing experience – despite the greatly different benchmark results.

I just took some time to try startup, navigation, and page display speeds between browsers on Win 10 version 1703.

Times on the same test system, measured with a 0.2 second resolution stopwatch:

• IE11 – start and load my home page: 0.8 seconds.
• Edge – start and load my home page: 1.4 seconds.
• FireFox – start and load my home page: 2.0 seconds.
• Chrome – start and load my home page: 0.8 seconds.
• An old copy of Safari – start and load my home page: 1.0 seconds.

• IE11 – navigate first time to askwoody.com: 3.0 seconds.
• Edge – navigate to askwoody.com: 3.2 seconds.
• FireFox – navigate to askwoody.com: 4.0 seconds.
• Chrome – navigate to askwoody.com: 2.2 seconds.
• Safari – navigate to askwoody.com: 4.2 seconds.

• IE11 – navigate to Woody’s PayPal Donation Page: 3.0 seconds.
• Edge – navigate to Woody’s PayPal Donation Page: 2.8 seconds.
• FireFox – navigate to Woody’s PayPal Donation Page: 3.8 seconds.
• Chrome – navigate to Woody’s PayPal Donation Page: 3.4 seconds.
• Safari – navigate to Woody’s PayPal Donation Page: 3.2 seconds.

Make of these results what you want. I don’t see a clear winner.

-Noel

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Elly, HiFlyer, satrow, lurks about

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Noel,

Your results are typical of what I would expect in the real world. All the browsers will load the same page at about the same speed with no browser being consistently better than the rest. Too many variables on real world pages for a lab speed test to be meaningful.

One variable on the web that is uncontrolled is the response time of the server. Sometimes they are painfully slow.

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HiFlyer, Noel Carboni

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Browser benchmark results are dependent upon the hardware, how fast your PC can run the javascripts, etc., therefore benchmark comparisons are only valid against the other browsers you test against – and only accurate when you run them under strict testing conditions, clean boot, clean browsers.

Comparing your results against those run on a different system is pretty pointless, as are browser benchmarks generally as they only test relatively few specifics across a narrow subset of what real world browsers need to be capable of.

It’s the benchmarked difference between the different browsers and different ‘bitnesses’ of each browser that’s more important, and those differences can change, sometimes dramatically, from one release to the next.

Most important is how little the browser gets in your way, it’s a container for displaying the content you want to access so use what works for you. BTW, there’s nothing wrong with using multiple browsers, some work better than others on certain sites, eg. Google’s Chrome on Google owned sites.

If you have privacy concerns, check how much prefetching each browser does and how easy it is to control it, does it connect to servers you don’t visit, do those servers leave traces?

Also some benchmarks mark down browsers when you turn up the privacy levels, like disabling geo-location.

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Elly, HiFlyer, Noel Carboni, woody, lurks about

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Thanks.

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I wonder if you would test https://www.brave.com/ browser against Octane2.0.

It outperformed my Chorme by just a smidge, but blew my Firefox away.

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By “we’re not that stupid?” you mean who? Few of us aren’t, a vast majority are. Windows in its current incarnationS is targetted at those — they are easy to fool and to dump anything on. Satisfying knowledgeable smart user is much harder for MS to satisfy, so they’ve essentially given up. Why bother providing value, when it’s easier and much more profitable to exploit ignorance?

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wdburt1, HiFlyer, lurks about

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I dunno, a VERY large number of people resisted Windows 10 and are still running Windows 7.

For the rest: WaaC – Windows as a Circus. 🙂

-Noel

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HiFlyer

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If I had to guess, a majority of them will ultimately upgrade, they are just waiting for what has become an illusory stability. Once they do, MS will either afford to ignore us diehards, or make earlier versions unusable.

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HiFlyer, Noel Carboni

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This looks like the perfect example of the current marketing+design trend. Lies, d**n lies and statistics. Now with a boring flat design and childish saturated colors. The average stupid chump eats it all and fanboyishling brags for more.

Speed isn’t everything I want in systems, including browsers. Firefox gives me the ecosystem I am comfortable at, including security and trust (after removing it’s telemetry).

Edge is blunt, incomplete and marketing yadda yadda yadda. This reminds me of on how America dealt with coffee back some decades ago. There was no mastery skills to do it properly, so instead of better grains and the proper procedure to do it, people were shoved with better marketing.

Edited for content

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Noel Carboni

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Modern browser engines are basically fast enough that most users will not care which is the fastest on test. They will not notice a consistent difference between any. However, there is one issue as someone who has done web design really cares about: standards support and compliance. html5test (https://html5test.com/results/desktop.html or https://html5test.com/results/latest.html) lists each major browser and their support of HTML5 (max points is 555).  The best support is by Vivaldi then Chrome. Firefox and Edge are good. IE11 is a turkey. Given that MS has had a habit of erratic support of web standards in the past I would be more concerned about this in the future than how many milliseconds it took to load a test page.

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Elly, HiFlyer, Noel Carboni

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Is this again some kind of stupid test done on a build that has lots of built-in features and security turned off that makes the browser look much better than it will be on a production machine?

Also, I don’t care THAT much about speed, thank you. I prefer privacy and security. If your default in your face and unescapable from Cortana browser is not used enough and you need to constantly nag people to try it and people go out of their way to avoid it, maybe you did something wrong.

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Elly, Noel Carboni

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I was most surprised to see how the Octane 2 number for Edge on my test machine declined when I was running Edge, simultaneously, on a different machine.

Not sure if I can replicate it…..

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I have seen the same machine have trouble loading a page and 5 minutes later the same page load quickly and perfectly with the same browser. In the real world there are too many variables that will affect apparent browser performance. Some of these are beyond user control. So I take these “studies” with a large grain of salt.

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Does anyone care if it takes 1 second less to load a page? If so, I suggest a therapist would be better than a new browser.

Windows 10 Home 22H2, Acer Aspire TC-1660 desktop + LibreOffice, non-techie

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radosuaf

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In all seriousness, if a program takes less than 1 second to respond, just the act of using it isn’t going to distract a person. If it takes longer, there is a chance that the user’s train of thought will be stopped and they will find themselves thinking about the program itself instead of what they’re trying to use it for. Then, once it catches up with them, they will have to work at regaining their focus once again.

These kinds of things matter to someone who’s working at or near the limits of their abilities – which is what it takes to succeed at high tech today. This is why a fast, powerful workstation is generally better for doing content creation work than a run-of-the-mill PC. It’s not something most managers and non-technical people think about much because they generally don’t struggle at the limits of their capacity to juggle details while simultaneously keeping in mind big picture goals.

In short, using sluggish software or a sluggish computer is tiring and causes failure.

Life is more complicated than ever now. We need systems that help us keep our minds on the tasks at hand more than ever.

This is why SSDs have been such a boon. They speed up responsiveness markedly.

-Noel

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Elly, satrow, samak

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Very interesting. Thanks.

Windows 10 Home 22H2, Acer Aspire TC-1660 desktop + LibreOffice, non-techie

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Noel Carboni

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Agreed, when I moved to an SSD several years ago I estimated I’d saved ~1.5 hours over the first 2.5 days, simply because the distractions and loss of train of thought were eliminated. Get your hardware (and OS install) up to scratch whenever you have the money and time to do so, then software startup issues will be reduced to the point where they’re immaterial.

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Elly, Noel Carboni, Kirsty

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For those interested in a very readable short book about the sort of misleading techniques MS is using here, I highly recommend the classic “How to Lie with Statistics” by D.Huff which can be found at :

faculty.neu.edu.cn/cc/zhangyf/papers/How-to-Lie-with-Statistics.pdf

Chapter 5 deals with this particular technique.

Edit html to text

Windows 10 Home 22H2, Acer Aspire TC-1660 desktop + LibreOffice, non-techie

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Elly, Noel Carboni

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Maybe it’s worth adding that the book was first published 63 years ago, so using misleading statistics and graphs is nothing new.

Windows 10 Home 22H2, Acer Aspire TC-1660 desktop + LibreOffice, non-techie

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Good find.

“Nothing new” is most certainly not the same as “should be outdated”.

In the era of high tech, where graphic displays can be accurately rendered by a computer in an eyeblink, we should expect graphs and charts and readouts to be accurate.

When do the computer systems themselves start lying to us in order to achieve ulterior goals? Microsoft is pushing dangerously far in this realm (take, for example, GWX going ahead and installing Windows 10 when people closed the dialog with the [X] caption button).

We don’t need to be gamed at every turn; life is complicated enough already.

-Noel

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Elly, samak

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NetDef wrote:

Oddly, even though Edge has the highest score, it consistently loads / renders most of my daily/favorite web sites noticeably slower than FF or Chrome. It’s especially bad on my banking sites. Does this perhaps suggest that Edge is cheating the test? (Not uncommon for bench marking suites to be gamed by their targets.)

Human perception isn’t very reliable with determining things like page render speed.  A browser that begins to render first, but that ultimately takes longer to finish the page, will be perceived as faster than one that pauses longer but gets it all done faster.

Speed is only one bit of the equation for a browser.  For me, nothing else comes close to Firefox– there simply isn’t anything else that has the addons and the tools to wrest control from the page designer and return it to me where it belongs.  I want things the way I want them, and the browser is here to facilitate that for me, not to display the page faithfully as some designer I’ll never meet thinks is ideal.

Unfortunately, with Mozilla’s fetish for trying to make Firefox into a Chrome clone, they’re cutting off most of their addon library in favor of Chrome-style addons that are far less powerful.  Why is it that every bit of software ever always has to fall prey to what looks like an attempt at suicide by its own devs?

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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I doubt many would switch for incremental improvements in speed. This really is a none issue these days. Chrome has had several years of tweaking the browser and also creating a large user base. Incremental speed, or claims of improved battery life won’t sway most to dump a mature and familiar Chrome browser for Edge. Clearly after this long and with very little to show in adoption of Edge I really think Microsoft needs to rethink how it has done Edge and focus on why users have not taken to it. Selling users a line of BS about speed or battery life or security isn’t working.

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The plot, it thickens!

https://developers.google.com/octane/

Octane is retired

Octane 2.0 is a benchmark that measures a JavaScript engine’s performance by running a suite of tests representative of certain use cases in JavaScript applications.

Please note that Octane is retired and no longer maintained.

~ Group "Weekend" ~

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