On the other hand, pretty easy how such a div might trigger a less efficient path; if the video is top in the z-order then it can probably bypass being composited by the browser (and who knows, maybe even bypass being composited by the OS) and avoid a whole mess of rendering to a texture, texturing some triangles, and so on and so forth.
FWIW, I think you're a little credulous there; as I mentioned in my other comment[1], I can't find anything stating that Chrome starting beating Edge at the test (their videos actually claim the opposite) or anybody from Chrome boasting about it (articles from the time like yours[2] also say the opposite).
> On the other hand, pretty easy how such a div might trigger a less efficient path
I mean, sure, you can always fall off the fast path, but given how common transparent divs over video are, the battery benchmark should have come with even more caveats. Edge is the most battery efficient browser†!
† for playing fullscreen video††
†† Battery test not valid if the page doesn't use the exact layout youtube used in December 2017. Also not valid if testing vimeo, or twitch, or any porn site, or...
> it's doing something that lacks any real reason but which hurts Edge.
In my own web development activities I can point to hundreds upon hundreds of hidden, invisible, and obscured DOM elements that have no obvious reason to for existing to someone outside the code-base where you find the commen explaining the required work around, browser hack, or legacy constraint. I've also experienced wildly divergent performance on MS browsers compared to others when creating content, often from something as trivial as DOM order or composition.
Clearly Google owes me some money for my part in their ongoing conspiracy to hurt Edge. I'm flexible, I'll accept GCE credit :)
> it's doing something that lacks any real reason but which hurts
Hey, there's a new div in the DOM, the only possible reason for a change like that is so Chrome can advertise about beating Edge on a benchmark nobody cares about? Even though they never beat Edge on it and this "advertising" never took place?
This was the credulity I was talking about. These events didn't happen (you literally wrote the stories plural! about edge winning the benchmark) and the motivations make no sense. I'm not sure why you'd repeat it without even a warning that it may just be a narrative made up from grumblings about fixing a fast path heard third hand.
I do care about video playback battery performance.
So much so, in fact, that I bought my current laptop specifically so it would last long when watching videos.
Also note that tablets, smartphones, the Macbook Air and the Surface are sold on their battery stamina, and specifically while watching videos. And how would you measure that? Youtube, of course!
> And how would you measure that? Youtube, of course!
Makes total sense, but if you're over-fitting for Youtube's exact layout in 2016, you're eventually going to have to update your optimizations. Sites don't stay the same forever.
Right. My take is "hey, good engineering to not need a power brick. But to what end? What's the practical purpose of this engineering? Why not just make the system bigger?"
One of the (many) reasons I've heard they had to abandon Longhorn was that apparently it was essentially unbuildable. The build was broken so much of the time that they gave up and started over.
Good luck with that. It's working for Raytheon with a clearance.
> (C) discrimination because of citizenship status which is otherwise required in order to comply with law, regulation, or executive order, or required by Federal, State, or local government contract, or which the Attorney General determines to be essential for an employer to do business with an agency or department of the Federal, State, or local government.
It isn't on all hardware. Intel has two ME firmwares, a small one for consumer systems, and a big one for corporate/enterprise systems. The small one does not (or at least, should not; is not supposed to) include the remote management features.
In other words, the separation that you describe exists.
Systems with the full firmware sport things such as the vPro branding, and only certain combinations of CPU and chipset support it.
I'd be careful with assumptions on what "consumer hardware" means. There are desktops, NUC units, etc, that shipped with i5 and i7 chips that had vPro.
Even with the CPU, you also need the right chipset and the right firmware to actually light this stuff up. While especially in the laptop sector there are consumer devices that include this, it's far from universal.
Sure, if you install a GNU stack (glibc, for example, being an important part) you can run typical Linux software on Android. It's not the default, however. While the Linux kernel has proliferated, the userlands are more varied; Android/Bionic on phones and tablets, uClibc on routers and other embedded roles, GNU/Linux for most servers and desktops--though even in that final category, we see substantial variation such as systemd versus init.
Sometimes this is to Linux's advantage; it underscores its flexibility, and the ability to use, for example, busybox uClibc on small systems is definitely an advantage. But other times, like having no standard UI toolkit that works across desktop, tablet, and phone, or having different approaches to managing services/daemons, the advantages are less clear.
Canonical was heading hard in this unified direction, but I'm not sure what their current phone/tablet plans are. Their stupidly implausible kickstarter seems to have disrupted these efforts.
The bigger issue is that the big desktop toolkits, GTK in particular, can't keep their APIs straight. Every other release or so they change some behavior or remove/replace something.
This in contrast to the kernel where once something is in, its in, and stays in that shape.
Thus you can run a CLI binary from the early 90s against a modern kernel. But you can't run a GTK binary from a year or two ago against a current lib version.
Edit: hve you taken to defending your own articles on third party sites now? Dueling in the Arstechnica comments not enough?
