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Microsoft Aims To Close Performance Gap With Internet Explorer 9
Barence writes "Microsoft has unveiled the first details of Internet Explorer 9, promising that it will close the performance gap on rival browsers. The major newcomer is a revamped rendering engine that will tap the power of the PC's graphics card to accelerate text and graphics performance. 'We're changing IE to use the DirectX family of Windows APIs to enable many advances for web developers,' explains Internet Explorer's general manager, Dean Hachamovitch. As well as improving performance, Microsoft claims the hardware acceleration will enhance the appearance and readability of fonts on the web, with sub-pixel positioning that eradicates the jagged edges on large typefaces."
Sweet! I can't wait to replace Firefox on my MacBook Pro and my desktop Ubuntu box with this, it will run awesome on those! I wonder when I'll be able to get AdBlock for it?
Hardware acceleration of text and pictures is one thing. Javascript performance is quite another. What with all this AJAX and Javascript stuff out on the web these days, what IE badly needs is a really good Javascript engine. Two school computers, one running Chrome (out of my home directory - bad sysadmin!) and the other running IE8, have very obvious differences in their Javascript speed on a benchmarking test (Sunspider, FYI). (They're school computers, their hardware should be exactly the same, their uptime should be exactly the same, etc. etc.)
So, where is Microsoft going in this category?
Note: I was 13 when I wrote most of this. Take with several grains of salt.
Firefox is my primary browser, but I'm not in love with it by any means. It just has so many integrated Add-On that I cannot live with out. Copy the Firefox Add-On system and I'll take a look at your browser.
Oh yeah I also want working keyboard shortcuts.
Why is the real/normal world so much smaller than the MS world?
-]Phreak Out[-
Now that I've calmed down. How come the other browsers don't have to hit the hardware to gain this "performance"?
I look forward more to resolution independence. It would REALLY nice to express a picture or font's width in terms of screen (or table) proportion, instead of pixels (ugh).
It would save everyone so much time. Let's hope super-super high resolution monitors (OLED anyone?) come shortly to make this more of a reality.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
So better code means less users?
I think it's more because people just don't care.
-]Phreak Out[-
Why do people realise how stupid benchmarks are, yet parrot on about ACID all day?
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
As long as web developers will keep supporting non-standards-compliant garbage like IE the users won't care.
HAND.
As long as IE has a majority of the market, whatever IE does is the effective web standard, regardless of what any standards body has to say.
(Note, I'm not saying this is necessarily a good thing, but I'm pragmatic.)
That depends on the OS. On some the price of creating a new process is very high. On others a process costs only a little more than a thread.
Please, when you get into the multiple seconds range, you are WELL beyond any OS process creation overhead...