Why does Safari have such a cow over animated gif's?
That and shockwave presentations- as soon as you view a webpage with any of that stuff on it, and resource useage hits the roof. Then switch back to a more simple, all-text webpage, and resource useage goes back to minimal. Even webpages where you can scroll a bunch of smilies off-screen (like the post new reply windows here at AI), it makes a big difference. On-screen...sucking resources like Monica Lewinsky in a...(well, you get the point). Off screen...resource useage drops like a rock.
I just don't understand why animating itty-bitty gif's should require so much CPU (unless some API is still broken here in OSX land). I'm just saying that if showing animated smilies is on par to playing a cool fps game wrt hardware demands, something has got to be wrong, no?
I guess this is more of a rant, but I am curious to know if anyone else has noticed this and agrees that this could be pulled off with better finesse than it is now?
Also, I don't know how the other browsers that show animated gif's fair in this category. Maybe it is exactly the same? ...not just a Safari issue? What's the word?
EDIT: It appears that IE OSX has the same behavior. Anybody know about Netscape, Camino, etc?... Maybe some of this stuff is no longer getting 2D GPU acceleration? Did it ever? I just don't recall these things having such a heavy penalty in my web browsing travels of OS9 yore.
I just don't understand why animating itty-bitty gif's should require so much CPU (unless some API is still broken here in OSX land). I'm just saying that if showing animated smilies is on par to playing a cool fps game wrt hardware demands, something has got to be wrong, no?
I guess this is more of a rant, but I am curious to know if anyone else has noticed this and agrees that this could be pulled off with better finesse than it is now?
Also, I don't know how the other browsers that show animated gif's fair in this category. Maybe it is exactly the same? ...not just a Safari issue? What's the word?
EDIT: It appears that IE OSX has the same behavior. Anybody know about Netscape, Camino, etc?... Maybe some of this stuff is no longer getting 2D GPU acceleration? Did it ever? I just don't recall these things having such a heavy penalty in my web browsing travels of OS9 yore.
Comments
There really isn't any excuse for it, so I hope the release that fixes it gets out soon. Hyatt's code tree seems to be months ahead of the formal releases.
Originally posted by Amorph
If memory serves, It's due to a ludicrous inefficiency in KHTML. I can't remember whether Dave Hyatt's said he's fixed it or not, but I know that he's very much aware of the problem.
There really isn't any excuse for it, so I hope the release that fixes it gets out soon. Hyatt's code tree seems to be months ahead of the formal releases.
is the animated gif problem tied in with the poor (high cpu hit) on shockwave pages?
Originally posted by badtz
is the animated gif problem tied in with the poor (high cpu hit) on shockwave pages?
I doubt it, but I could be wrong. The quote I read from Hyatt specifically concerned animated GiFs.
I've heard that Flash runs like a dying sloth no matter what context it's launched in, so I imagine that's an implementation problem on Macromedia's part. Certainly, OS X should have no trouble at all flinging vectors around...
check your preferences...
Originally posted by Amorph
I've heard that Flash runs like a dying sloth no matter what context it's launched in, so I imagine that's an implementation problem on Macromedia's part. Certainly, OS X should have no trouble at all flinging vectors around...
Macromedia is (was?) notorious for great, but poorly written software, especially on the Mac. The Flash Player has always been a good example. They have improved greatly in OSX now, but in the past Flash played choppy in any browser in 9/X while it was smooth on Windows.
Originally posted by Thorzdad
Still, there is definitely something lacking in Safari (or OSX's) handling of some Flash content. Take for instance this website, which runs wonderfully using I.E. under OS9, but is nothing but a dead black hole using Safari. The OSX version of I.E. can manage to display the content (somewhat) but it's a shaky, buggy ordeal.
There are a lot of variables there.
It would be worth testing to see if the difference is that IE is punting the work to a Flash plugin while Safari is punting it to QuickTime (which has its own inbuilt Flash support).
Originally posted by Paul
do you have pithhelmet installed?
check your preferences...
Yes, I do. I had disabled it, but I guess that didn't do it. THANK YOU.
If I had a smaller screen I wouldn't see 'em all and it would probably run slower, but smaller screens is not the solution.
Apple, please fix this!
Does anyone know if limiting the # of repeats will speed this up?
Makes you wonder- if you wanted to view that webpage of dancing hamsters in fullscreen glory, how many G5 TeraHz would you need to do it? ...or maybe this could be the impetus for how a G5 cluster is now a practical thing for the home user (to view more than 5 smileys onscreen w/o keyboard lag, of course)? ...or maybe some bright programmer could come up with an Altivec-enabled plugin for hardware smiley acceleration?
it has the latest webcore and you can turn of gif repeating so after 10 seconds the smilies stop and CPU usage drops back to 5% or so...