Archive for September, 2007

A little while ago, it started behaving strangely during charges, and the time the laptop would run on battery dropped significantly. Now, it seems to be just dead:

$ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state
present: no


The sad thing is this battery is (only) 3 years old, while the battery in my other laptop, more than 6 years old, is still alive (though it would empty in half an hour).

Someone in the "Why no Opera?" thread on the debian-devel list mentioned tkhtml/hv3, and how it passed the Acid Test (though he didn't mention if it was the first or the second Acid Test).

While it is a known fact that Mozilla doesn't pass the Second Acid Test yet (you have to use 1.9 alpha for this), it is also known that Safari has been for more than 2 years, and Konqueror, since version 3.5.2. So just to be sure, I gave it a try with WebKit (the one currently in unstable), and the results are... well, see for yourself.

This is what QtLauncher display, when the window is quite large, which is just perfect.

Now, this is what you get when the window is not so large, but still large enough for the whole thing to be displayed.

And what you get when you shrink the window more and more.

It goes further down when you shrink even more.

Sadly, the Gtk port is not as good.

It also does the "going down when shrinking" thing.

Update : Apparently, the "going down when shrinking" thing is a known "feature" of the Acid Test.

Update : The reason why the Gtk port is not fully passing the test is that while there is a KIOslave for the data url scheme, curl doesn't support it.

GyrosGeier has briefly talked about machine readable copyright files in Debian. I won't talk much more about it, except pointing out the current proposal, and my own first implementation on the webkit package.

Note that, huge as the source is, I didn't feel like listing copyright information file by file, but rather set of files by set of files, grouping all files under the same licensing terms. Even doing so, the copyright file is still more than 600 lines long. And well, obviously, the ftp masters didn't reject it.

Ars Technica has recently posted an article about the new Opera alpha release, with some Javascript benchmark results showing it is quite faster than version 9.23. It also goes to compare with Firefox and IE7, but omits some other not so unimportant browsers. I think the main reason is because they seem to have only tested Windows browsers. Sure, Safari has been released recently on Windows, but it is still quite marginal.

Anyways, I was wondering how all this was going under Linux, and also, how (good?) WebKit would perform compared to others.

So, I tried the same Javascript speed tests on various browsers under Linux on my laptop, which happens to be a Pentium M 1.5GHz.

And the winner is...

So, It seems the speed gain Opera got on Windows doesn't happen much on Linux.

An interesting result, is that Iceweasel, with a bunch of extensions installed, is slower than Epiphany, despite both using the same rendering engine and Javascript library. Running Iceweasel in safe mode makes it the same speed as Epiphany, though. So having extensions does not only clutter the UI, but actually has an impact on how fast the Javascript code in web pages is going to run.

And well, WebKit is the fastest for this testcase, though it stays behind Opera on some specific tests.