PS Vita: General Discussion

[GraphiteGB]

Mozilla/5.0 (Playstation Vita 1.50) AppleWebKit/531.22.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Silk/3.2

Yep Sony added a User agent ID for the vita browser instead of spoofing another, they added a ID that will allow Sites to block/divert it to Other sites.

Get the emails in to your favourite sites now asking that they DO NOT divert it to the MOBILE version and instead ask for them to get on with the HTML 5 site conversion instead... 

The web kit build is not that old after all. As the chromium stable browser im on is 535.2... 

Yes the browser is named as "silk" in the PS vita thats the same Family as Amazon Kindle fire is using hope thats a mistake...other wise Sony paid for the Amazon browser. 

types "silk web browser" in to google for a few bad reviews of it.   

[FrazerEllis]

Hopefully they'll have upgraded the browser with Flash by the time it's launched over here!

[GraphiteGB]

Don't expect Flash games, Shockwave gaming code has never been coded or tested for linux.

I can't run it..

Adobe would have to DO a u-turn on there statement that no new Flash video player would be coded for mobile devices.

After they told all site devlopers that they had to go code HTML5 from now on.  

[GraphiteGB]

Java script engine test from sunspider results thanks to an english youtube poster finaly

Total:36774.2ms +/- 0.0%


3d:4267.0ms +/- 0.1%
cube:1164.1ms +/- 0.1%
morph:1678.7ms +/- 0.1%
raytrace:1424.2ms +/- 0.4%

access:5563.6ms +/- 0.0%
binary-trees:501.6ms +/- 0.1%
fannkuch:2917.6ms +/- 0.0%
nbody:1255.7ms +/- 0.1%
nsieve:888.7ms +/- 0.1%

bitops:4646.6ms +/- 0.1%
3bit-bits-in-byte: 819.7ms +/- 0.1%
bits-in-byte:1148.1ms +/- 0.1%
bitwise-and:984.9ms +/- 0.3%
nsieve-bits:1693.9ms +/- 0.1%

contolflow:608.8ms +/- 0.1%
recursive:608.8ms +/- 0.1%

crypto:2353.6ms +/- 0.10
aes:1053.8ms +/- 0.1%
md5:644.6ms +/- 0.1%
sha1:655.2ms +/- 0.1%

date:2306.1ms +/- 0.1%
format-tofte:1186.7ms +/- 0.1%
format-xparb:1119.4ms +/- 0.2%

math:6093.1ms +/- 0.0%
cordic:1463.1ms +/- 0.0%
partial-sums:3691.3ms +/- 0.0%
spectral-norm:938.7ms +/- 0.1%

regexp:4051.3ms +/- 0.0%
dna:4051.3ms +/- 0.0%

string:6884.1ms +/- 0.1%
base64:878.5ms +/- 0.1%
fasta:1273.0ms +/- 0.5%
tagcloud:1396.0ms +/- 0.1%
unpack-code:2267.7ms +/- 0.1%

validate-input:1068.9ms +/- 0.1% 

Translation = Its slow browser.. 10* slower than a single core lap top... 

[raffieltiger]

That's really disappointing results for the speed test. Although now it has a build of Webkit, it could lead to a faster browser in the future by adding more libraries. Webkit isn't meant to be so slow. I just feel that it's incomplete but will be upgraded sometime next year before the International release if Playstation Suite wants to succeed.

[Tribble6]

At least SunSpider works in the Vita's browser! In the PS3 browser, with debugging turned on, you just get an error...

For comparison on the speed test, the latest version of Chrome running on my 2.4GHz dual core pc, the "Total" for the test was 0.93s (compared to 36.78s). IE 8 didn't do so well though at 5.09s. It should be noted though that to achieve even the three hours of reported battery life, the Vita's processor cores are likely only running at say 1GHz (anyone know the actual speed they run at?).

Sony should have perhaps rolled out the browser at a later date, when it could do the "state of the art, quad-core console", justice. As it stands, the Vita is getting quite a bit of negative press from the browser, such as from the recent Engadget review, which is a shame as the OS in general looks very nicely done.

[jeff_rigby]

Vita Browser Fluff reporting from Digital Foundry which is usually very in-depth.

Originally Posted by http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-playstation-vita?page=4:

"The Web Browser 

Put bluntly, the browsing experience on offer here isn't where it needs to be, with Sony once again using the sub-optimal NetFront software that didn't acquit itself particularly well on PS3. Pages don't load as fast as we'd like, with a checker pattern background standing in place for a good second on the default PlayStation homepage whenever we pinch or drag the screen in the direction of new content." 

Gesh, get up to speed <pun intended grin>. The Vita browser is not finished and has few HTML5 features implemented including <Video> and <audio> as well as web workers.  Without web workers the browser can't use multiple CPUs efficiently and for a browser designed to use web workers but not implemented yet, it's probably severely crippled. This will change when web workers support is implemented and the comparisons to other platforms that already have webkit2 and web workers support should be favorable. 

Originally Posted by http://www.ign.com/articles/2011/10/26/vita-browser-won%E2%80%99t-support-flash:

"It was previously confirmed that the PlayStation Vita would have an internet browser, but Famitsu (via Gamasutra) has now revealed the first details. According to their report, the browser will support cookies, Javascript 1.7 and HTML5, but not Flash."

You can't have javascript 1.7 and have HTML5 so the author must have meant a UNIX (Vita is BSD Unix) webkit port using the most popular UI toolkit or GTKwebkit and at Vita release Dec 17 the GTKwebkit2 version was 1.72 with a similar unfinished HTML5 feature set. 

Netfront Access NX browser uses Webkit and can use the GTK toolkit for UI. Since the PS3 webkit disclosure lists GTK_library and has GTK to POSIX changes we can assume GTK or modified GTK is used. IT also contains a reference to GeoClue_library which can only be used with a handheld so a guess is that the same core webkit is being used in both Vita and PS3 which would be a modified GTKwebkit2. In a Netfront NX port, the platform developer (Sony) is responsible for the UI and for the choice of UI toolkit 

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost...postcount=1056 

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost...postcount=1094 

Netfront NX browser 

[Plambey]

what are people expecting from this browser exactly!?! i'll b using it to google stuff about vita games i'm playing and check a few sites max, it'll be grand...

[Spirit0fLight]

Good luck with that, the browser won't even run in the background you have to completely exit out of the game.

Mobile browsers on phones are way faster.

[Tribble6]

---

jeff_rigby wrote:

 Without web workers the browser can't use multiple CPUs efficiently and for a browser designed to use web workers but not implemented yet, it's probably severely crippled. 

---

Given that IE9 doesn't even allow web sites to use "Web Workers" yet, this is not something Sony needs to be concerned with (in the short term). The main thing is to improve, "big time", the rendering speed of the browser (the appearance of the "checkerboard" pattern (poor scrolling performance) is almost unforgivable, on portable device as powerful as the Vita) and use a very fast JavaScript engine. Also, when support for Flash / HTML 5 video playback is added, use at least one extra CPU core, so performance is optimal (or split the load between the three available cores).

Apart from in HTML 5 games, I don't see that "web workers" are such a big deal. For example, a common Web 2.0 task is to download extra web content from the web server, which you can do already in "the background" (asynchronously - means user can carry on using web page while the content is being downloaded, although, most of the time you would want to wait anyway (for it to be displayed), e.g. loading a new feed on the YouTube home page). Also, "web workers" (essentially non-UI "worker threads"), do not have direct access to the web page (can't access the DOM and communicate with main script via events), and a good deal of the time you are updating the web interface, as with context highlighting, so super fast rendering / JavaScript is the most important thing here.