Steam Hardware & Software Survey...

[Ekaros]

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

I leave hardware as it is, interesting thing for me is the software...

Sadly it doesn't tell the amount of mechanical keyboard users

Few snippets:
Mozilla Firefox 63.05%

Microsoft Office 57.26%
WinRAR 45.28%
µTorrent 29.41%
OpenOffice 14.63%



These are pretty intresting results, Firefox in Steam Userbase is somewhat understandable.

MS Office compared to OpenOffice, seems strange...

Also, old WinRAR? And there is quite many µTorrent users

[godly_music]

What surprised me is the current Intel, NVidia and DirectX 10 popularity. Pretty much describes my setup, but I assumed AMD and Ati had more going on.

You can't expect the "barely computer literate" gaming masses to make good software choices, that's why MS products rank so highly here. Foobar2000 below 3%? O boy.

[Senor_Cartmenez]

I don't think the nVidia think is weird.

They had some "better" grafics cards when a lot of the current heavy gamer generation started out and nVidia fanboys are in one league with apple fanboys. Can't beat that "loyalty"

[Ekaros]

Hmm, other strange thing is SLI versus CrossFire 92%+ vs. 4.33%+...

[bugfix]

Mozilla Firefox 63.05%

Ugh, fatfox.

Opera ftw.

[keyboardlover]

Opera ftw.

Agreed!

[bugfix]

Agreed!

Woohoo!

[db_Iodine]

Hmm, other strange thing is SLI versus CrossFire 92%+ vs. 4.33%+...

Yay! I'm a minority running a crossfire setup. Those percentages do sound a bit odd tho..

[Apocrypha]

Ugh, fatfox.

Opera ftw.

Opera, which only includes a web browser, mail client, IRC, bittorrent... need I go on?

(I use Chrome though, so I win ^_^)

[db_Iodine]

Opera, which only includes a web browser, mail client, IRC, bittorrent... need I go on?

(I use Chrome though, so I win ^_^)

I use Firefox, Chrome and IE all mixed up. What did I just win?

[godly_music]

Fatfox is kind of backwards, I'd call it slowfox. Opera is the new fatfox (and Chrome the fattest chubby fox), but it is damn fast.

[keyboardlover]

Chrome creates a new process every time you open a tab! Not exactly a "slim" design

But it's supposed to use less memory which is the big deal behind it. Unfortunately I've found that it uses much more CPU power than Opera or FF.

[steeef]

But Firefox still has all the addons, making it better for people who actually want to enjoy their web experience.

What add-ons specifically? I held off using Chrome at work until the functionality of my favorite add-ons were duplicated by Chrome extensions, but now I see no reason to go back to Firefox.

[microsoft windows]

Chrome creates a new process every time you open a tab! Not exactly a "slim" design

But it's supposed to use less memory which is the big deal behind it. Unfortunately I've found that it uses much more CPU power than Opera or FF.

I've used Mozilla, Google Chrome, and Opera; and I like Opera the best. Chrome runs terribly when a lot of tabs are open, both Chrome and Firefox open some links in new windows by default, and Opera does none of that. Opera runs well, and everything's kept  in the same window.

[Apocrypha]

And yet, the signature

I have no problems with Chrome's speed at all, but with an SSD, 6GB of RAM and an i7 I shouldn't.

It's the fastest browser for my fast hardware, but I've seen it run on my sister's computer. She has a 3500+, 2GB of RAM and a rather old harddrive. And she likes to keep at least 20 tabs open at a time. Start up time is terrible, switching tabs too much seems to lock stuff up. It's just not tolerable to me.

I also used Chrome on a crappy work computer, have more than 5 tabs open at once started killing the performance there as well.

[db_Iodine]

I always have my firefox with 20-40 tabs open. That's just how I roll. The session is also saved so I don't have to load all those tabs every time I open FF, and it still starts in less than a second.

[JosePepe]

You can run Chrome as one thread, but I wouldn't recommend it, using this flag:

-single-process

Both browsers are good and it is a matter preference.  I use chrome because it is easier for me.

As far as AMD vs. Intel and nVidia vs. ATI, I had to go with nVidia and Intel.  I use a lot of OpenGL in Linux and need the performance there.  Unfortunately, ATI's "open" hardware lacks matching nVidia's proprietary driver.  Ideally, I would like to run AMD with nVidia, but you really get robbed of feature set this way.  There are very few motherboards with an nVidia/AM3 chipset that also have USB 3.0 and SATA III.  For future proofing and instant gradification, I've sold my soul and run i7 w/GTX 570.

[godly_music]

Chrome creates a new process every time you open a tab! Not exactly a "slim" design

But it's supposed to use less memory which is the big deal behind it. Unfortunately I've found that it uses much more CPU power than Opera or FF.

No dude, the opposite is true. A new process for each tab is their idea of sandboxing. It means that it duplicates identical code in RAM for each instance which means it's the fattest chubby fox.

[keyboardlover]

No dude, the opposite is true. A new process for each tab is their idea of sandboxing. It means that it duplicates identical code in RAM for each instance which means it's the fattest chubby fox.

Wow. So it's not really such an interesting design then. It sounds more like the "bloatiest possible design". I remember when I read the design spec it said that in most browsers when you close a tab, not all the objects in use by memory from that tab get garbage-collected, which leads to performance problems. The multi-process design was supposed to solve that, because when you close a tab it destroys the entire process, memory and all.

[godly_music]

Yeah, it does release memory better than Opera for example. If you browse half an hour in Opera and then close all tabs but leave the browser running, you're looking at a big number.

The paper I read said that they tried to minimize duplicate code as much as possible. But the security system they use needs at least the Chromium part of each tab to have its own memory. I still think it's an interesting design, because most people have more memory than they actually use. It's just not for me. One other problem with the process-per-tab is that it may take a few miliseconds longer to open one. If the harddisk is busy, even more noticeable. With an SSD you probably wouldn't notice it at all, but I'm not buying into that technology yet. :biggrin:

[JosePepe]

If you don't like the multiple processes, try running Chrome or chromium with --single-process.  I like the fact that each tab spawns a process.  It makes use of machines having multiple cores and multiple logical cores.  It also takes advantage of 64-bit memory management.  Basically, it more like an OS than a typical browser.  Ever notice how a bad page can take down IE or Firefox and make them non-responsive?  In Chrome, only that tab becomes non-responsive.  If you have a machine with 4-8 logical cores and over 4GB of RAM, why not take advantage of it in your browsing experience?