New Tricks for Old Desktops

I’ve been doing some testing on Windows 10 this week. I’ve had the preview version loaded on an old desktop so that I can check out whether various programs work and, in short, they do. I haven’t looked into too many of the new features but from what I have seen of it they have combined the best bits from Windows 8.1 with an interface that is easy to use for desktop and laptop users and shouldn’t, for the most part, have users of Windows 7 and previous versions running to the hills.

They have also introduced a new browser which is now going by the name of Microsoft Edge. They still have Internet Explorer installed but this is now hidden away and is presumably aimed either at corporate users or for the increasingly small number of web sites that only work on Internet Explorer. To be perfectly honest, I couldn’t detect that much difference between Edge and the other browsers I had been testing although I tend to have a preference for Firefox – mainly as I often use older hardware and this always seemed to work best on “vintage” IT. The desktop I was testing on had a motherboard dated 2007 and was running with a single core 64-bit AMD processor and 3GB memory so we weren’t talking about bleeding edge technology here.

It did get me thinking, though, about which browser works best on older kit. I’ve always found that Firefox tends to be gentler on machines with smaller amounts of memory although I have never determined how the number of CPU cores affects the equation. Given the decrepit nature of my test PC it was a good time to try it out. There are various tools for measuring browser performance and I’ve always been rather suspicious of them – in a way it’s a bit like the official fuel consumption tests for cars in that it is far easier to produce something that will work well in laboratory conditions rather than in real world usage. Still, it’s better than a finger in the air so I chose 3: Peacekeeper, Octane and Dromaeo to give a reasonable spread and tested them against Microsoft Edge, Firefox (version 39) and Chrome (version 42).

The results on the Windows 10 PC were as follows (higher figures mean “faster” – I added all the Dromaeo results together to get an overall score):

	Peacekeeper	Octane	Dromaeo
MS Edge	772	6000	39188
Firefox	1736	7930	63441
Chrome	1260	8946	58122

Out of interest I ran the Peacekeeper one against Internet Explorer and came up with a figure of 834 although consecutive runs of these jobs can produce slightly different figures. The first interesting thing here is that the different tests favoured different browsers. I believe the Octane ones are used by Google developers whereas Dromaeo is used by Mozilla developers so there shouldn’t be too much surprise that they seem to favour their particular software – it’s the old official mpg tests in play again. Peacemaker claims to be independent so their stats are telling. I did run their tests on my work’s laptop (an 18 month old Dell) and they are much closer (just a 10% difference between Firefox and Chrome) which may indicate that they are better tuned to run on more modern hardware. The MS Edge figures don’t look as clever but is it the whole story?

I tried opening the various browsers with a few common websites open: BBC News, Facebook and Twitter. They all seemed to start up in a reasonable manner but how they were running in the background was interesting. Edge has a very memory light application process but some processing is going on behind the scenes. Chrome opens a separate process for each tab and Firefox has everything in a single process. I suspect that this means that Chrome and Edge would make more efficient use of multiple processors but it may also explain why Firefox seems to work better on older kit.

Ultimately, I think it comes down to personal preference and I remain a fan of Firefox. What did impress me, though, was how well Windows 10 ran on my old desktop (this has previously run Linux Mint and originally had Windows XP on it). At one time it was pretty much the case that a new release of Microsoft’s operating system would necessitate new hardware and, inevitably, speed the rate at which the old hardware would be heading to landfill (or, one would hope, a recycling plant). This operating system appears to have the opposite effect and may even give a new lease of life to aging PCs and laptops. They are giving a free upgrade to existing users of Windows 7 and 8 but wouldn’t it be nice if they could have a free (or minimal cost) version to those on older hardware that may have a defunct version of Windows on?

It still remains to be seen exactly what Microsoft’s plans are and I am hoping the 29^th July rollout will go smoothly. If Microsoft are sticking with a paid for licence model on older equipment there is still the Linux route but I think they would be missing a trick with that one.