Floreada.io uses modern web browser features to provide near-native levels of performance. The main technology that allows this is WebAssembly, which is utilized by all the computational expensive code in the application. WebAssembly is a newer technology and older web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, do not support it. Additionally there are other browser features that allow code to execute in parallel (i.e. instead of running on just one of the cores of your CPU, it runs on as many cores as your CPU has), which can make the application several times faster (if you have a CPU with 8 cores it will be approximately 8 times faster). Finally for some specific calculations, we are able to use features which tell the CPU to operate on multiple data events at the same time which can get up to a 4x performance improvement.
All together these technologies allow for a 10-50x performance improvement. For most Flow Cytometry operations (file loading, gate calcuations, stats, drawing plots) we think we meet or exceed native commercial flow cytometry applications in terms of performance. (And we have more room to improve).
Floreada.io will work best with the latest version of a Chromium-based web browser or the latest version of Firefox. This includes any of the following:
or
The latest version of all of these browsers support all the technology required for Floreada.io to run its fastest.
The latest version of Safari (version 15.2 at the time of writing this) supports Webassembly and will work fine. However it does not support the other features used to increase performance and will run several times slower than one of the above browsers.
Most mobile browsers will work. Several limit the amount of RAM we can use more than desktop browsers. All modern desktop browsers allow up to 4GB of RAM, whereas some mobile browsers limit this to 1-2GB. This will only impact you if you open a lot of FCS files or several really big FCS files.
Right now we recommend using Floreada.io on a desktop web browser although we intend to improve the mobile experience soon.