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IE9 Throws Down the Hardware Acceleration Gauntlet
An anonymous reader writes "Over on Microsoft's IE blog they have an interesting comparison of browsers with regard to hardware accelerated page rendering. They write, 'One of our objectives with Internet Explorer 9 is taking full advantage of modern PC hardware to make the browser faster. We're excited about hardware acceleration because it fundamentally improves the performance of websites. The websites that you use every day become faster and more responsive, and developers can create new classes of web applications through standards based markup that were previously not possible. In this post, we take a closer look at how hardware acceleration improves the performance of the Flying Images sample on the IE9 test drive site. When you run Flying Images across different browsers you'll see that Internet Explorer 9 can handle hundreds of images at full speed while other browsers, including Internet Explorer 8, quickly come to a crawl.' Absent from the comparison is a nightly build of Firefox with Mozilla's forthcoming Direct2D acceleration enabled."
Instead of reducing the amount of computation we do in IE to make it faster, let's just look for more processing power instead!
Here be signatures
I feel sad about it when hardware acceleration is needed for rendering, what, websites.
We live in interesting times indeed. I want my Web back.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
I'll bet that Chrome and Firefox will have this in production before IE9 is released.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
What about those of us who don't want to see flying-rotating-3d-semitransparent-glowing-shaded adverts flying across our web pages.
I want fast clean loads of information. Not bloated pages full of shiny dodads designed to divert my attention from the information I am looking for.
I've never understood this 'my browser is faster than your browser' attention. Most people use their browser over the Internet, with download speeds that make any computer wait. There is a ton of time processing 3 or 4 threads simultaneously to still draw page components. I see pages show up in a couple of seconds, it takes far more than that to read them.
... once. When I first visit. Then they are discarded every time as I concentrate on the content of the web site.
So a few web sites want to use some fancy graphics. I only see their fancy graphics
Just make the browser work...it's fast enough already.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
You patched up the wound but the scar will always be there.
I'm often left sitting there for microseconds while the page is rendered in software. I'm sure having hardware accelerated rendering of web pages would change my life immeasurably.
BTW Microsoft, if hardware acceleration is so important why is the GDI not hardware accelerated in Vista and only partially accelerated in Windows 7 (about nine functions) even though it was fully accelerated in XP? Can we get some consistency here?
Why do people keep using idioms which don't mean anything in the modern language any more?
On naive reading it would sound like IE9 is giving up.
Are they talking about breaking standards in order to accomplish this?
Really shouldn't the Operating System be using hardware rendering for graphics calls?
Yes I know that they are probably using D2D or DirectX to handle this but don't the hardware graphics calls in Windows use hardware acceleration already?
I hope that Xwindows does I know that OpenGL does but over all an application shouldn't have to care about "hardware" at all! That is why we have Operating Systems.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
is still the download speeds. HW acceleration aint gonna help there.
Yeah IE is faster, for awhile. It is faster right up to the point when someone uses one of the huge security holes to stick some serious malware onto your computer!
IE's poor security will give malicious content providers direct hardware access to your video system.
Is there any work on OpenGL hardware acceleration paths for use of chrome, firefox etc. on non Windows platforms?
What hardware acceleration of web page rendering could/will android and chrome OS use? (OpenGL ES?)
He... It make sense, since "Hardware is cheap and programers are expensive".
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/12/hardware-is-cheap-programmers-are-expensive.html
My main problem with IE is not speed, is rather fast. The real problem with IE is how broken, unsafe and unstandard is. Making it faster, will just make it faster to infect computers, show poorly rendered pages, and ignoring standard CSS3 keys.
Look at this tables, the support for CSS3:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc351024(VS.85).aspx
-Woof woof woof!
Ultimately, all software is hardware accelerated.
Should be GPU acceleration instead of hardware acceleration. It's not like a separate device from your regular computer and not like all the software isn't running on hardware anyways.
I hope this works well in vmware, because that's the only way I use IE.
Or am I not understanding what they're proposing?
"developers can create new classes of web applications through standards based markup"
Yes, standards that MS create and try to enforce developers to use.
You're not understanding. They aren't proposing any new standards, they're using hardware acceleration on existing standards. Rendering HTML, CSS and Javascript with help of your GPU, that's basically what it's about.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
How many websites have hundereds of flying images? None that I visit regularly.
Websites are slow because the internet is slow and Javascript is slow.
Hardware acceleration might be needed by Flash, but this wont provide that.
On my macbook pro, Safaris is the winner! 60 fps consistently. Firefox reached 45 fps. Sadly, Chrome is is my default browser now could only go upto 6 fps!
Who cares about IE9 anyway ?
if this accelerates my web based video on demand streaming server then I am all up for it.
It wont make my progressive download faster though.
"highlighting my failure to keep things minimalistic"
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
All GPU accelerated text rendering I've ever seen sucks. I mostly read on the web, don't care much about animated GIFs and their modern equivalences.
What about those of us who don't want to see flying-rotating-3d-semitransparent-glowing-shaded adverts flying across our web pages. I want fast clean loads of information. Not bloated pages full of shiny dodads designed to divert my attention from the information I am looking for.
The Interwebs are about freedom, and you are free not to view any site you feel is offensive in some way. Interweb freedom is about the freedom to choose. IE9 chooses certain voluntary standards, and not other voluntary standards, and even creates some of its own voluntary standards. All of which you are free not to use because of the freedom to choose a different browser. It's about freedom. Freedom to choose, not freedom to be restricted to RMS' view of how the Interweb should be.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
If there was anything worth reading on hte Internet. Most of it is just gibberish, press releases, dumbness, jingoism and Italianism.
Thank you for providing such a clear example of exactly what you're complaining about.
for their shitty ie8 treats tag as a block level element. which means, you cant format or distribute long, populated forms properly with the use of divs, tables or any other form of structured output tag. adding "display : inline;" to a separate style declaration into the form tag doesnt fix it either. so, if you have any nested structure coexisting with the form, the tag acts like a or a
in regard to that structure in ie8. no other browser has this issue, not even ie6 has this issue.
this is a current hell, that i am in precisely at this second in time, and i have to fix their incompetence for my client.
so my advice to them is ; fix your browser before doing any 'acceleration'.
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i would like to call the idiot who modded the above flamebait to come and fix the tag block level interpretation issue in ie8. their rendering engine is screwing up, and since it is proprietary, it cant be fixed by community. so we have to wait microsoft to get its ass up and fix their incompetence themselves in some far away point in future.
adding a proprietary directx to the mix will just increase these kind of hellholes, due to adding another dimension to watch out for. and since its proprietary, someone somewhere wont be able to produce a fix and publish it to relieve everyone.
so, the fool that modded the above flamebait, please, come and fix this rendering failure today.
Read radical news here
Won't load for me on Firefox 3.6.3. Did we just Slashdot MS?
There is a war going on for your mind.
Well IE and Mozilla are currently getting a severe beating in the speed stakes from Chrome, so they have to do something!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Using trademarks to denigrate the opposition? My, my: I guess that shows exactly how much Microsoft respects (other people's) "intellectual property".
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Microsoft, developers of the Internet Explorer (IE) browser, said that Acid3 does not map to the goal of Internet Explorer 8 and that IE8 would improve only some of the standards being tested by Acid3.[32] IE8 scores 20/100, which is much worse than all relevant competitors in their versions from the test's release, and has some problems with rendering the Acid3 test page. On 18 November 2009, the Internet Explorer team posted a blog entry about the early development of Internet Explorer 9 from the PDC presentation, showing that an internal build of the browser could score 32/100 for the Acid3 test.[33]
On March 16, 2010, a public Developer Preview for IE 9 scored 55/100 presented on the MIX2010.[34]
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Acid4
Got to love how Microsoft appears to minimize that which it cannot muster.
Home of the delusional Linux nerd.
Your comment was well modded!
From TFS: "The websites that you use every day become faster and more responsive, and developers can create new classes of web applications through standards based markup that were previously not possible."
Web developers (probably mostly the ones who use Front Page) are going to make their sites even more unfriendly to phones than they already are. Here's a hint, web developers -- Microsoft doesn't own the browser market any more. Make your pages as light as you can, because more and more, people are going to access the internet through their phone. You don't always have a computer handy, but you DO always have a phone handy.
Free Martian Whores!
Hardware accelerated Spyware and Malware.
Moreover, Hardware accelerated crashes.... Way to go!!!
WebGL is pretty much extras to make canvas draw 3D stuff (right?).
IE9 and the newer Windows Firefox builds, on the other hand, want to run other things--SVG, HTML text, ...--faster and smoother-looking by just drawing them with Direct___ APIs behind the scenes (instead of GDI like they always have). Those are different goals, and (I hope) not mutually exclusive--I'm sure some of us would want to have both spinny 3D canvas widgets and big-ass HTML docs run at a silky clip if we permit them at all.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
From TFA page:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/04/07/a-closer-look-at-internet-explorer-9-hardware-acceleration-through-flying-images.aspx
Result: 95 errors / 2 warnings
I say things which affects my Karma negatively. (and I don't care) For instance; All religion is false.
Look at the GWT blog: http://googlewebtoolkit.blogspot.com/2010/04/look-ma-no-plugin.html. Here is a webkit browser running Quake II in JavaScript at 60 fps. This is what they will be competing with. Again MS is starting from behind and falling further behind. When I measure Javascript performance in IE9, I can't see a difference form IE8, not sure if this is debug code in IE9 or just the JS I'm using, but so far, not particularly impressed.
Do we really need hardware acceleration to render web pages?!
I get the same results they do when using IE8. But on my Mac, in Firefox 3.6, I get 30 to 45fps.. how is it so much faster? Is this a mac thing?
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
please tell me why we have to explain 'proprietary is bad' each and every time. i just provided an explanation despite all this havent i ?
i just want to know : why do we have to tell that it is bad each time we talk about it. it IS bad. noone knows whats in it bar 50-100 developers in a corporation. 50-100 developers who may get reassigned to other projects or cease working there at any given point. noone fix it but these people. noone can better it but these people.
see, because such 100 or so people were incompetent as to make ie8 treat tag as a block always (even if you tell it not to), i had to take away an entire formatting structure out of a website form and had to separate buttons with   ; . i didnt want to give absolute positions like morons, and nothing else availed. imagine. this is SO much 'bad form' in html that i cant even start to explain. yet, i had to do this in order to make ie8 properly align mere 3 buttons in 3 different forms.
it is strategically foolish to trust in proprietary software.
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Microsoft is at it again. Comparing their alpha software to released software all the while forgetting to mention that the competitors are implementing the kind of thing. Hey Microsoft, you're not the innovation leaders here so stop pretending that you are. http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2009/11/22/direct2d-hardware-rendering-a-browser
ayottesoftware.com
This is actually a fairly clever move on the part of MS. A lot of GPUs in use today are more optimized for DirectX than OpenGL. DirectX is a Windows only technology owned by MS. IE is about the only Windows only browser out there. So if Firefox, Chrome and Safari are planning on implementing GPU acceleration they have to implement either both Direct2D and an open alternative for Linux and OS X (OpenCL?) or they risk lagging on performance based upon MS's leverage with graphics card manufacturers via hardware and driver optimization. Further, MS can contrive tests that show for some use cases IE9 is faster than whatever browser on OS X or Linux.
please the zealot who mods down everything that is against proprietary software regardless of merit of the post, come forward.
Read radical news here
Their flying images demo just kept on rolling when I tried it with firefox 3.6 on my slackware linux box. I jacked the number of images up as high as it would go and it was still doing something like 50fps. So looks like firefox got their first.
"How would you like to get infected today ?"
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Glorious news.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
... I need more SH*T in my web pages?
The Web is becoming Television. Ads, video where I was hoping for information, next thing you know they will prevent my saving... oh, wait.
Seriously, the Web is becoming sensationalized, and content is becoming so tiresome and overwhelming that I fear clicking on many links 'cause I know I'm getting a 2 minute video when I thought I would get a text synopsis of something mildly interesting. Not to mention advertising is becoming indistiguishable from malware.
No, let me rephrase that. Advertising is BECOMING malware. No site is immune. Whether it's X17 or the New York Times, they are getting ads pushed through that are just criminal malware.
It's all pus. I'm reading actual paper books more than ever. Copyright claims aside, I OWN these, and can read them very efficiently thank you. Keep your Kindle and iPad for now. I don't want eBooks.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Why will Firefox use Direct2D instead of SDL?
Twinstiq, game news
Opera is also absent from the comparison. In my comparison (completely unscientific, Photoshop and a bunch of other heavy programs running on the background), Opera's last stable version (10.51) runs at a cool 60fps with cpu usage peaking at 35%. Firefox runs at 30fps, continuously using 50% of the cpu (one core). Chrome crawls at 2fps using about 40% of my cpu. IE8 also runs at 2-3fps using one core at its full.
Keep in mind that Vega, Opera's new display engine, uses software acceleration only, but it can use DirectX/OpenGL.
It may be 7 digits, but at least it's a semiprime
the only deciding factor in the time it takes IE9 to render a page, is the time it takes me to answer 'no' to the question if I want to install flash multiplied with the amount of flash ads the page has. FAIL.
It doesn't really matter how fast you can try to do it if you can't do it at all...
So that's IE faster at not rendering standards compliant pages correctly then. Great. Just what every user and web developer wanted. Fail.
your posts equates proprietary software with 'better than the competition', and free software with 'inferior'.
no such delusion exists.
im going to assume that you havent formulated your argument wrong, and you dont have misconceptions, and give a proper answer :
because it is utterly, strategically foolish to build on a framework that is programmed by 50 ever-changing group of developers in a closed company that can change its priorities at any given point :
- noone fixes any issues with the framework but those 50-100
- priorities of the company matter. if company thinks issues with that product/framework are lower priority, they wont get fixed until company decides otherwise.
- the company decides whether something needs upgrading or not, noone else. it may decide to push an upgrade despite it is not necessary, and therefore cause a lot of hassle and expenses to everyone, both clients and developers. just like how microsoft tries to push stuff in windows oses, like the lock-down dx10 to vista trick, despite xp was well capable of running its home-user relevant components. the ones that couldnt, were related to people who were doing extreme end 3d animation, and those people dont use windows to do that, they use purpose built servers.
- if the company decides to write off the framework, everybody gets fucked. even though i am a small size developer, i had a few clients who were fucked up by microsoft deciding something wasnt worth it, like the bcentral ecommerce service. they just came up one day and announced their clients that their stores were going to be deleted in a month, and they should take care of themselves. bcentral was incompatible with everything else, and you had to manually import your inventory to any other ecommerce platform. my client had to recreate an inventory of 2000 products, with their options, prices, and images manually.
- noone but the company knows whats in that proprietary software. you cant go in and vet it. its a BIG security risk. it is stupid to use them in sensitive places.
man. the list is endless and i dont have time to list many more.
if, as someone in i.t., you are not aware of these issues, and STILL ask 'why proprietary software is bad', and ask everyone to justify themselves when they say so, you are either really, really young and new in this business, or you really really should get out of I.t. sector.
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Speed is useless if you are still wasting the time of every Web developer by not meeting Web standards. It costs everyone in time and money to build a Web site. Both Safari and Chrome pass the ACID test flawlessly. IE should stop being an exception.
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" Franklin
I feel sad about it when hardware acceleration is needed for rendering, what, websites.
I want my Web back.
Time for your meds gramps. Can I fetch your walker?
What they're not telling you is that in order to enjoy all of this wonderful hardware-accelerated browser goodness, you must only visit sites implemented using Silverlight with DirectX stuff embedded in it. But you were going to do that anyway, right?
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
The firefox nightly does 60fps easily with the demo site, uses one CPU, mybe 20%. This is on a not very new Dell optiplex; newer and faster CPUs would use less. This is on Linux.
This might sound paranoid, or even cynical... potentially retarded. If IE takes over the entire market again like it had, it would set us back starting the entire diversity process over again. Thus, should we avoid using IE out of principle? I think it would encourage developers to work on something else rather than "beating" IE and allows for a genuinely creative and new ideas; as less time is spent competing with the complete crap IE has historically been. Any billion-dollar company can throw a bunch of programmers at a problem, and that's what they're probably starting to do. Jeez, how many years and version releases has it taken them to just get to IE8? And IE8 is still a half ass piece of sluggish shit.
I'd like to see a point where it seriously makes that much sense to have the basics rendered with the help of the GPU, though. In this case, having a bunch of images spin and float around in 3D space, it would make a hell of a lot more sense to use a 3D standard like WebGL than something that has always been used primarily for 2D only. Maybe I'm not understanding, either...
3D graphics is just one example this technique could be used for, but you can render any HTML, CSS or Javascript using this technique. How can you not see the point of using your hardware more efficiently to make processing times shorter?
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
I don't know what they did their testing on but their report of frame rates for Safari is way way off. I'm running Safari 4.0.5 and MacOS 10.6.3 and I can get 50 fps with 256 images smoothly and rapidly rotating. It uses 88% of one core (2.8GHz) to do so, but I have no idea how much (if any) GPU usage it has. Why do you suppose they claim Safari gets only 5.2 fps?
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
So, is IE9 now going to implement standards correctly, or is it just going to be "wrong, but fast".
I'm running a 5 year old P4 and never have issues with slashdot. Well, not speed issues anyway.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
DirectX is not important in this case, it is only because of the Direct2D which accelerates 2d grahics, and DirectWrite which accelerates the writing. I'm not sure which library you could use for opengl. I would be interested to know, it was one of the reasons I switched from opengl to directx....
I'm pretty sure he was equating "hardware-accelerated" with "better than the competition" and "purely software-rendered" with "inferior."
Disclaimer before I get flamed for being a Microsoft shill: Hardware acceleration still isn't enough for me to switch from Firefox to IE. YMMV.
I don't know. I guess they'd have to show me something that it actually becomes a significant improvement without a better solution already floating out there somewhere for it. In this thing, I can imagine WebGL would just be the better alternative (and more likely to actually be fast across several browsers, not that MS gives a shit--they probably want to avoid anyone thinking like that at all, knowing MS). At the current state, however, I can't think of any site that would be fast enough to actually be noticeably faster (most are already fast enough that I'm not going to notice much--if any--improvement, with Chrome, and the rest are probably still going to load like shit on here, just because their so horribly designed), and that wouldn't be more logical to just use another standard. Sure you can hack all kinds of funky things with Javascript, HTML, and CSS, but some times adding in another standard on top of that just makes more sense--just like programming anywhere else goes. I used 3D more as an example at that idea (I'll admit, it's probably the best idea I can come up with without thinking much).
I'm using a 600 megahertz AMD something (equivalent to a Pentium2), and it loads slashdot fine. Of course I have it set to Classic index and Simple User interface.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
"and developers can create new classes of web applications through standards based markup that were previously not possible"
IE9 isn't going to do this no matter what technologies are included. I can't deploy standards compatible web applications because of one thing and that is IE 6. Actually even if Microsoft killed off IE6 somehow I'd still be faced with IE7 and still only be halfway to decent standards compliance. Really supporting standards in IE 9 is important but real standards compliance web apps will still have to wait until 2014 (the currently projected year of IE6's retirement). So I'll continue to develop web apps using standards and never deploy them until I've spent at least as long working around IE quirks.
Their flying images demo just kept on rolling when I tried it with firefox 3.6 on my slackware linux box. I jacked the number of images up as high as it would go and it was still doing something like 50fps. So looks like firefox got their first.
I'm getting about 20-30fps in firefox 3.6 on a su2300 netbook. IE 8 gets about 1fps.
"The point of turning the web into an application platform is that Windows is suddenly rendered completely irrelevant."
Perhaps web apps would be more successful if the point was providing the user with a superior tool.
Did they test against this?
Your views are a smidgeon childish. You missed the all important point: the new OpenGL 3.0 rivals DirectX, so the choice of DirectX isn't obvious anymore. DirectX was better and therefore defacto the past 8 years, so of course there was no decision. However, I would love to hear their rationale for choosing DirectX over openGL today!
I'm running WinXP (updated) on a P4. I tested it using Firefox 3.5.3 and IE8:
I get 18-22FPS using Firefox
and less than 1FPS in IE8! WTF? The firefox rendering was even usable!
Internet Explorer 9: Unleash the fury (on you)! Now with brand-new hardware accelerated infection reception systems(tm). You're not only screwed, you'll be screwed much faster than everyone else. (And that's a good thing as you've never been screwed by anyone...)
Ever wanted to spread your legs on the streets of the most sleazy part of town. Now imagine doing that on speed. While everybody else is on steroids.
Strip off those blotchy underpants, give your mommy a kiss and get ready to become a travelled man!
Passively travelled.
Highly frequented, at any rate...
I, for one, welcome our new SVG based, hardware accelerated pr0n overlords.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
No, of cousre not, but they shouldn't develop in spite of the millions of us who are sick of it. We *aren't* alone. All the time i hear the same thing from 'regular' users. "why does this take so long".. "why does my pc slow down when i go here"..."i just bought a new pc and its slow now too" "what is with all these moving advertisements all over my screen on every webpage" etc.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
As the owner of a quad core with an Nvidia 8800 I am constantly underwhelmed by applications (3D, Video Editing, power point... basically everything that's not a game) performing absolutely mediocre because they don't take advantage of even basic acceleration capabilities of my sound and graphics hardware. What the hell is the point of having built in mpeg or dolby 5.1 enc/dec if nothing uses it? I might as well still be using my SB16. My video card is supposed to be able to decompress avc natively but my NLE stupidly throws it at the cpu making my 512mb 8800 no more effective than a 16mb Voodoo Banshee. I don't care if it's office, my web browser, or Adobe Premiere. I bought a bangin GPU because I wanted my apps to use it. Microsoft can't clean up the millions of crappy web pages out there by releasing a new browser. They can however make those millions of crappy web pages hog less of the CPU.
Typo, I meant openGL 4.0!!
It is going to wrong and slow. Yeah yeah, GPU based rendering, but most PC's don't have a GPU. And this says NOTHING about its javascript engine (IE is the slowest of them all. In fact if it was a race, IE would be running backwards, then drop dead) and the dom etc. So they can pass one test very quickly. Good for them. It is about time because with their current browsers they fail every single test without fail.
And I fear what advertisers will do with this.
But frankly, considering the recent removal of Flash from some websites because of the iPad, I think MS might hopefully be to late. If companies are no longer willing to ignore a "small" number of users whose browser is not IE, then they will not be making use of any gadget MS adds.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Using 3.6, gentoo, latest xorg and nouveau I get 33-35 with maximum images set. This is good enough no?
Got their first what?
10 years ago slashdot was probably 99% technical-minded people. As its popularity increased, so did its readership, to include people who are less technically-minded.
I see the same thing with the pro-microsoft crowd. 10 years ago slashdot was probably 1% pro-microsoft. Nowadays I find myself wondering if there aren't more pro-microsoft people here than not. This isn't because there are more pro-microsoft people in the world, but simply because slashdot's popularity has expanded to attract them.
I am that "Libertarian" that he is refering to.
I apologize that his post is strictly to troll both here and another site he harrasses regulars at.
I am not here to stir the pot, just to set the record straight. This is a technology site, and he (in his normal trolling style) is attempting to take a personal jab at me.
Rest assured that while the line of thinking is close to what I was saying, he spun it in a way to fit himself. This isnt the place to go on about it, so I will leave it at that.
Anyways, sorry that this had to waste your time. The guy is a constant pest on our site as well.
Cheers.
I'd expect them to always have a way to "win" these contests.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
20-45 fps with maximum # of images on ff3.6 on ubuntu 10.04 on macbook intel graphics... so you don't have have too much GPU horsepower to run this at a decent rate on linux.
The point of their test isn't achieving high FPS. It's achieving high FPS with low CPU utilization. My crummy laptop gets about 40 FPS with Firefox 3.6.3, but the CPU meter is pegged at 50% (one core fully utilized).
I'm getting a steady 60 fps on a two years old MacBook Pro, with a vanilla Safari (no alfa, beta, nightly build or whatsoever).
getting constant 60fps with 20% cpu in Opera with about 15 other tabs open and 10 other applications open.
IE 9 will render pages incorrectly more quickly. How is that useful? I'd much rather have it render pages according to the standards, however long it takes.
Next time you go on the web try smoking some meth beforehand, you'd be amazed at the huge number of squished up tabs that seem to appear in virtually no time at all along the top or bottom of the screen, then open the task manager & see what that does resource wise, you'll see what I mean.
Their flying images demo just kept on rolling when I tried it with firefox 3.6 on my slackware linux box.
Indeed, and IE produced exactly zero FPS on my Debian box!
To be fair, it also had zero CPU utilization, which is pretty impressive. :)
Awesome, FireFox nightly (Minefield) was web gl, google just release quake 2 on the browser, and now microsoft brings out a browser that can make pictures fly fast. Sheesh!! All this fanfare for a browser without canvas support making it 1.5 years behind the competition and its not even released yet. This is outright sabotage of web development advancement.
Give up MS, use WebKit and be done with it, no developer is impressed by your redundant graphics acceleration in SVG, graphics acceleration in canvas would have been a worthy mention however.
Haiku's browser get's pretty good results too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMO1SqSmv3s
You use a meta tag to turn on GPU acceleration in Safari. It even works on iPhone. So this is disingenuous. If you deploy something like this, you add the meta tag to turn on layers in Safari.
Shut the fuck up and do what you're paid to do. If you can't there are other people who will. Argh.. I'm tired of whinny bitches who think they're entitled to shit and are afraid of actual hard work.
http://techie-buzz.com/browsers/firefox-3-7-mozilla-developer-preview-1-9-3-alpha.html
The Mozilla Firefox Alpha 3 developer preview was released on the 17th of March. The developer preview 1.9.3 Alpha which is available for testing has the latest Gecko layout engine. It is an early release in the development cycle. The changes seen in the developer preview are:
* A Direct2D rendering on Windows is available and turned off by default.
* Significant API improvements have been made.
* Stability has been improved by using a mechanism to abort memory allocation if it does not get fulfilled in time.
To turn on Direct2D rendering, got to type in about:config in the address bar. Now, look for the key gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled and set it’s value to true. Next, set the value of the mozilla.widget.render-mode key to 6.
I tried the MS test of FF 3.7 A4 and with Direct2D off I get 11 frames a sec on 36 objects with it on I get 41-50
It's worth a play.
works in opera no problem
Mine continues at full speed with all of the images too, on Firefox 3.6.3/Ubuntu 10.04.
Because they're comparing browsers on the same hardware and OS; in their case on Windows.
And Safari on Windows has a quite different rendering pipeline from Safari on Mac; it can't leverage the same set of system frameworks, etc (and the general drawing model is quite different too). So on benchmarks which are gated on rendering I would expect significant differences between Safari on Windows and on Mac. I would expect similarly significant differences between Firefox on Windows and Mac and Linux (especially Linux; high-performance graphics without just using OpenGL is a huge pain on Linux).
This is why, for example, webkit only supports 3d transforms on Mac: they just offload the work to a system library that exists on Mac but not elsewhere.