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."

Comments

Re:I feel sad.

[sznupi]

You can still encounter such speeds often, when using mobile access (3G not everywhere, overloaded network, EDGE not attaining it's max speed too, and so on)

Yeah, it's a bit frustrating...though, luckily, there are ways to make it much more smooth; such as Opera Turbo with disabled plugins.

Re:Hey everyone, this is Microsoft!

[jim_v2000]

>reducing the amount of computation we do in IE

Apparently that's not working so hot for the other browsers in this case: "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."

Re:I feel sad.

[maxume]

There are preferences to turn on the old version.