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Tag: Ringmark

  • Test Your Browser’s JavaScript Prowess With Google Octane

    Test Your Browser’s JavaScript Prowess With Google Octane

    Facebook and the W3C have contributed greatly to the development of mobile browsers with Ringmark. The simple test makes sure that your browser is compliant with the latest and greatest HTML5 technologies. Google has taken that concept and applied it to JavaScript applications.

    Google announced today the immediate availability of Octane. It’s a JavaScript benchmark suite that tests your browser’s ability to handle the most stressful of JavaScript applications. It’s a good idea since JavaScript is quickly becoming more popular thanks to HTML5. Games and other applications make liberal use of JavaScript and people need to be sure that their browser can handle the load.

    Of course, there are JavaScript benchmark suites already out there. What makes Octane different? Google says that old benchmarks were only used to test a specific feature of JavaScript. Octane tests them all with the traditional V8 benchmark suite alongside 5 new benchmarks. Here’s what Octane will test:

  • Box2DWeb runs a JavaScript port of a popular 2D physics engine that is behind many well-known simulations and web games.
  • Mandreel puts a JavaScript port of the 3D Bullet Engine to the test with a twist: The original C++ source code for the engine is translated to JavaScript by Onan Games’ Mandreel compiler, which is also used in countless web-based games.
  • Pdf.js is based on Mozilla’s PDF reader and shows how Javascript applications can replace complex native browser plug-ins. It measures how fast the browser decodes a sample PDF document.
  • GB Emulator is derived from an open source emulator of a famous game console running a 3D demo.
  • CodeLoad measures how quickly a JavaScript engine can bootstrap commonly used JavaScript libraries and start executing code in them. The source for this test is derived from open source libraries.

    • You can run the Octane benchmark here. It will run 13 tests in total with each one giving you a base score. The final score will be the geometric mean of all the previous scores.

    I ran a few tests myself and found some interesting results. Chrome returned a score of 14,705 whereas the latest version of Firefox returned a score of 8,582. Google says that Octane can run on mobile browsers, but it crashed my phone when I tried running it on the latest version of Firefox mobile. To be fair, it’s probably crashed because my phone is old and terrible. If you have a newer phone, it will probably work just fine. Just don’t expect any kind of amazing results.

  • Facebook’s Ringmark Goes Completely Open Source

    HTML5 and Open Source software are the future. Even if the old guard of software development don’t want to admit, it’s an inevitability. Facebook has helped move us along towards the future of Web and the power of the mobile Web with its Ringmark tool. Now the social network is giving Ringmark to the people.

    Facebook announced yesterday that they would be completely open sourcing the Ringmark tool. Previously, Ringmark had some of its core functionality, including its tests, go open source, but the entire software suite is now open source. Interesting developers can get the code on github right now. The rest of us can laugh at how our browsers still can’t pass the ring one test on rng.io.

    Speaking of not being able to pass the ring one test, Facebook has changed up the actual test to add in a benchmark for drawing performance. A browser that wants to pass the ring one test must be able to animate 50 sprites at 30 frames per second. A browser that wants to pass the ring two test must be able to animate 100 sprites at 30 FPS.

    One of the major problem areas right now lies in mobile browsers. They just aren’t fast enough to handle a lot of HTML5 games. Facebook, in their ongoing work with mobile, realizes this and will be implementing more tests in Ringmark soon to better test mobile browsers. Going open source also lets developers use Ringmark themselves and test for their own needs on mobile platforms.

    IDC also published an infographic last month that looks at how HTML5 is evolving the mobile platform. Facebook’s Coremob community along with Ringmark has contributed to the number of HTML5 mobile developers that are pushing the Web as the next big platform.

    Browse more Technology infographics.

  • Facebook Updates Ringmark, Changes Coming To Coremob

    When someone says open source, the first company to pop in your mind is probably not Facebook. That would be a disservice to the company though as they are pushing open source just like the rest of them. The company started the Coremob W3C Community Group to push Web standards and they open sourced RIngmark, the company’s browser test suite for building apps on the mobile Web.

    The company open sourced Ringmark back at the beginning of April and they are already making loads of progress. They have changed the main page of Ringmark to now make it easier for developers to understand. When looking at the test results, it should be clear what use cases correlate with the tests.

    The bigger change coming to Ringmark is that it’s now integrated into Browserscope. This allows developers to see where each browser stands in regards to the three rings of Ringmark. The benefit here is that a new browser is added to the Web site’s stats every time a new browser hits up Ringmark.

    As for Facebook’s Coremob community, Robin Berjon, the co-chair of Coremob, will start to review the tests that Facebook has submitted. Once all the tests have been processed and added to Coremob’s Github, Ringmark will run off of these tests for its standards.

    Coremob will also continue to contribute to the development of Ringmark. Community suggestions like version numbers and moving certain standards to certain test rings have all come from community engagement. Continuing this kind of engagement will shape the future of the mobile Web, at least as far as Facebook is concerned.

    If you don’t really understand any of this, but still want to have an impact on the future of the mobile Web or just the Web in general, hit up rng.io in your browser. This will run the Ringmark test and send the results of your browser to Coremob. I ran the test on all three of my mobile browsers – Android, Firefox mobile and Opera Mini – and found that the default Android browser was the most advanced of the bunch in terms of adopting Web standards.

  • Facebook Open Sources Ringmark To Make Mobile Browsers Better

    When Facebook first filed for its IPO, it was clear, reading through the company’s risk factors that the company has a lot of vulnerability in the mobile department, though it has certainly been working hard to change that. In late February at Mobile World Congress, Facebook announced some new initiatives to improve its mobile ecosystem.

    One of those initiatives was Ringmark, a new mobile browser test suite, which the company said it would donate to the W3C Mobile Web Platform Core Community Group, which consists of over 30 device manufacturers, carriers and developers. Today, Facebook announced that it is going ahead and open sourcing Ringmark altogether.

    Ringmark

    Anyone will be able to contribute tests to RingMark, and Facebook says it will soon contribute Ringmark tests to the group. “As we continue to build, we’ll continue to open source even more of this work,” says Facebook’s Matt Kelly.

    “Ultimately, we believe that web technologies are important to the future of mobile and that we can help to make HTML5 a well-supported platform for mobile developers to build upon,” he says. “For those that are building with the web today, it’s a major hurdle to learn native technologies like Objective-C and Java: and we hope that an improved mobile web can unlock a large contingency of developers that could, and will, be developing for mobile.”

    Ringmark, above all else, is designed to tackle the problem of fragmentation when it comes to the capabilities of mobile browsers. That’s where the W3C’s group comes in (and certainly the open sourcing).

    Those interested in contributing are directed to do so via the GitHub Ringmark repository.