Just browsing

For most people, HTTP is just an address prefix since most of the heavy lifting in parsing HTTP based traffic is done using the web browser.

Browsing the internet as you may know is dominated today by five main browsers: Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Firefox, Apple Safari and Opera.

The scope of this article is far from explaining what benefits from using each one, and mostly it comes down to which features you like and feel comfortable with.

Most browsers today share a common ground and are compatible with most processors today and because of that, most browsers today won’t benefit substantially from a stronger, faster processor. One way getting around it is to compile a browser code using the SSE processing libraries.

SSE – Stands for Streaming SIMD (or Single Instruction, Multiple Data) Instructions, can greatly increase performance when exactly the same operations are to be performed on multiple data objects. Typical applications are digital signal processing and graphics processing. Intel had already introduced SSE libraries back in 1999, which replaced MMX and ever since it’s found in every Intel processor.

What’s the problem?

With the major advancements in processing technology, Intel had extended the SSE libraries and the current version is SSE 4.2, but most improvements were done in multimedia processing, so don’t expect seeing browsers compiled with SSE4 anytime soon. However, SSE2 displays improvements in terms of performance and can theoretically boost performance by using more current processing functions.

Why you no standard?

Since web browsers aim to the lowest common denominator, and have compatibility in mind, most browsers are compiled using SSE libraries and not SSE2. If you’re processor is a Pentium IV and up (or equivalent), there’s no reason you shouldn’t upgrade to a faster web browser. While there are several alternatives, one release outperforms them all: Pale Moon.

Shine on Pale Moon

Pale Moon aims to strike a balance between features and speed. As such, a choice has been made to consciously disable a few features that are not commonly used by the largest group of users (such as parental control and accessibility). While relying on 100% source code from Firefox, it is specifically optimized for current processors by making use of the enhanced instruction sets such as SSE2 to address several performance and stability issues.