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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
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?
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.
So you've completely missed the advent of Web applications? Little Web based games, chat, e-mail, social networking, word processing, image editing, and hundreds of other incredibly popular Web technologies are currently limited by the rendering speed as often as by bandwidth. People will wait for a Web app to load, but that doesn't mean they're okay with waiting for it to respond when they do something in it.
If you just use your computer to edit text, then the same could probably be said about OS's and computer hardware. Why bother improving their graphics capabilities? Of course to do so you have to willfully ignore how they are used by normal people today and the direction they have been developing. They don't develop things just for you.
The hardware is already there, what's the point of NOT using it? If I have a gtx285 or something ridicilous and it's sitting there not being used that is WASTED. It's Win/Win for everyone.
did you forget to take your meds?
The idioms do mean things in modern language, that's why they're used. What you're trying to say is that the actual practice from which the idiom is derived is no longer in use outside of Ren Fairs. That doesn't matter, because meaning is independent of literal reading, which is the whole foundation of idioms in the first place. An idiom is literally some word or phrase that cannot be understood by literal translation. The end. So basically you're asking why do we use idioms at all, as though you want a bland, flavorless, mechanistic language with no depth, no humor, no layers, etc. etc.
In short, you're a dolt.
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
No, they're using completely standard HTML, CSS and Javascript for this demo. The only difference is that the scripting they've created consumes a lot of CPU cycles, which makes the animation it produces choppy. In IE9 they've added hardware accelleration, which makes it less apparent you're running a really hefty Javascript, because both your CPU and GPU kick in to do the processing.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
The "throw hardware at it" does make sense for business applications. However, that model fails at system hardware and mass production. If you manage to make a mainstream OS 1% faster, with the use of 1 coder working one year, 10 Million PC will get 1% faster. If you produce 100.000 washing machines, you cannot afford to put a 10 dollar CPU in each of them , you will have to optimize to run the OS on a 1 $ CPU.
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.
This is the decade of ignoring the majority and jamming what a few people want down the throats of the rest.
Since when did Slashdotters become the majority of internet users?
you must be crazy or something. You really think people need to be re-explained why relying on proprietary software is bad, especially when it comes to DirectX? I thought it was a given that people were smart enough to understand that proprietary = bad.
Why don't you take a look at how many other platforms support DirectX?
See, now I have to provide reasoning for things that are blatantly obvious, just because of your asinine comment.
You don't have to make a case for why proprietary could be bad.
You do need to make a case for why in a given case you think "better than the competition, but proprietary" is inferior to "inferior, but free", since it's blatantly obvious that it isn't true in all cases.
Slashdot is filled with Tech luddites. Kinda odd.
You didn't provide any reasoning at all. All you said is proprietary = bad.
Your reasoning is based on one quasi-statistic "Look at how many other platforms support DirectX."
How about a more relevant statistic: Look at the installed base of directX compared to other technologies on other platforms. Also, consider driver stability and hardware support from vendors.
You lose.
Similes are like metaphors
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
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.
Then don't visit those sites. Why is this hard for you?
More importantly, why are so many Slashdotters Luddites? It's just weird-- this is a tech site, why are you even reading it if you hate advances in technology so much?
Comment of the year
microsoft will give you binary compatibility for a decade ?
you mean they 'gave' you backwards compatibility. not any more. and probably they wont give it out any more either.
moreover, if your issue is more or less a common one, (and sometimes even if its an uncommon one) someone in an open source community will issue a mod/patch for it to make it backwards compatible.
Read radical news here
I would say you are very very young, and blinded by your faith in open source. 90% of the arguments you gave are true of open source as well.
because it is utterly, strategically foolish to build on a framework that is programmed by 5 ever-changing group of developers from the internet that can change its priorities at any given point :
- noone fixes any issues with the framework but 1-2 of the core group
- priorities of the core group matter. if the core group thinks issues with that product/framework are lower priority, they wont get fixed until you sit down and fix it yourself. The make sure you roll those changes into every new patched version as it's released.
- the core group 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 the php group no longer supports the 3.x branch with new features anymore, or the PEAR group has under gone so many incompatible releases, and then stopped.
As someone who is currently working for the largest advertising/marketing company in North America, I can say your guess is incorrect about who uses what for extreme end 3d animation.
- noone but the core group knows why half the code is doing what it is doing. For most businesses, having an expert at the source of every application isn't feasible, and companies can't hold open source groups legally responsible, nor can they realistically sue to get damages if something malicious is purposefully added to the code. Its a BIG security risk. it is stupid to use them in sensitive places.
if, as someone in i.t., you are not aware of these issues, you are either really, really young and new in this business, or you really really should get out of I.t. sector.
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.
Binary compatibility isn’t the problem on Windows. It’s usually undocumented API use, reliance on API bugs and security model changes that cause applications to not work.
Even Office XP which ran on Windows 98 runs under Windows 7.
I'd expect them to always have a way to "win" these contests.
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Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.