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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."
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?
"PC games do have their own graphics routines, don't they?"
Yes and no.
Games use DirectX which is part of the OS. But Games are not your typical application. They often go into a full screen mode and are not often run in a Window. They also have "game engines" but those tend to interface to DirectX, OpenGL, or what not.
A browser is not a video game.
It has to play nice with other applications and is rarely the primary user of CPU cycles.
Nobody cares how much memory a game uses or how many cycles it takes.
Browsers are applications and not games.
However even with games the OS should be handling this.
When I say draw a line, do a gradient fill, or render this font the OS should draw that line, do that fill, or render that font in the fastest way possible that is "safe". I shouldn't have to use some super wacked new API and I should never have to go right to hardware!
If Microsoft would make the effort to speed up the rendering calls of the OS then not only would IE render faster but EVERY PROGRAM ON YOUR SYSTEM would render faster.
Of course what could be happening is that MS does have some new graphics API that is faster and they are using it in IE and it is available to everybody. If so then the old APIs should just be stub code to the new APIs and still give very application a performance boost.
And to answer your question. "I don't see the need to bash MS for trying to get back in the competition. "
I am bashing MS for not speeding up their OS graphics calls so EVERY application I CHOOSE to run renders faster.
The whole reason we have big and complex OSs like Windows, Linux, and OS/X is so that our software doesn't have to deal with the hardware. It is abstracted so when new and faster hardware comes out every program can benefit from it.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
Then don't go to sites that don't give you what you want. Adding support for hardware acceleration is not going to suddenly make every site have flashy graphics, it's only going to allow sites to add flashy graphics. If you don't like it when they do, don't visit those sites. If enough people agree with you and the sites lose traffic, then they'll stop adding graphics. If not enough people agree then, well, sorry, but majority opinion will win out.
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.
What am I missing?
A lot.
Mobile Safari supports hardware acceleration of CSS. No hardware acceleration of Javascript or HTML5.
Yeah, and it pegged the GPU. So basically the GP is right; IE 9 is so inefficient that they have to offload computation to the GPU to make it usable.
And also: you know what else uses the GPU in Windows 7? Aero, the user interface. That means that if IE 9 uses up too much GPU time, your computer will be just as unresponsive.
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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Go fuck yourself, I don't have to show you anything. If you can't build CSS based web sites for multi browsers without jumping through hoops, it's because you're a shitty CSS coder. Go back to your games, little boy.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Are you so hateful and obsessed that you have....
You're the one that sounds pretty angry.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.