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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!
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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.
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?
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!
Why do people keep using idioms which don't mean anything in the modern language any more?
By definition, no idiom's meaning is apparent in modern language. Unless you don't know what a gauntlet is, this idiom is no different than any other. They are used because they are colorful and make our language more interesting.
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!
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.
Right, they're quitting because that stupid Elf keeps shooting all the food.
God, I hope so!
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.
That's the problem, exactly. Everyone knows what Gauntlet is, and throwing it anywhere is an offense worthy of painful death.
We cannot abide such sacrilege!
Terrible idiom...
Or am I not understanding what they're proposing?
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.
I would be glad if Microsoft would offer some kind of way to implement things like CSS rounded borders. Standard compliant or not, at least you'll have something to work with instead of creating stupid little images of rounded corners again.
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 ?
"highlighting my failure to keep things minimalistic"
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
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.
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Won't load for me on Firefox 3.6.3. Did we just Slashdot MS?
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Well they do have a border-radius demo on their page. They even included the -webkit parameters. Not sure if IE9 supports border-radius but it would be stupid to have a border-radius demo page on the IE9 demo website if it didn't support it.
Then that's a good thing. However, I wish sites would rely less on javascript and more and just good, efficient HTML. Or, do I have this backwards?
Well there's nothing wrong with Javascript to make things nicer, as long as it's gracefully degredating so the site is still usable without it.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Of course IE9 supports it. The problem is that IE6, IE7 and IE8 don't.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
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.
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O RLY?
http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fie.microsoft.com%2Ftestdrive%2FPerformance%2F01FlyingImages%2FDefault.html
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
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?!
That's really nitpicking. There aren't any major non-standard statements in the XHTML, CSS or Javascript produced by Microsoft for this testpage. The main reason it doesn't validate is because the validator is trying to parse the Javascript, which it can't and thus fails.
The focus of the story is that Microsoft hasn't invented a new standard for this to work, but instead made IE9 in such a way that regular websites will render more quickly because it can use the GPU in your computer.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
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?
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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.
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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Well too bad for IE6, IE7 and IE8 then. They'll get square corners. It doesn't prevent a website from displaying, visual variations are parts of the Web.
I suspect this will on average just make it use more power.
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.
I see you haven't actually developed a lot of websites for customers using Internet Explorer.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
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
At least they figured out CSS3 selectors. IE8 can't even get all of those--"From the 43 selectors 22 have passed, 1 are buggy and 20 are unsupported (Passed 349 out of 578 tests)" on mine.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Well, I don't think they even tried to make the test case W3C-compliant. At least wrap the javascript in //<![CDATA[ and //]]> lines so we know you had the validator in mind when you did that page.
And I think nitpicking is particularly educational for Microsoft considering its history of misconduct.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
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?
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Well, I don't think they even tried to make the test case W3C-compliant.
I think they did. They just didn't build it to pass the W3C Validator.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
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...
Because some of us are both literate ind intelligent and reject the modern notion that literature and intelligence are bad things. Since you're obviously biased against learning, what are you doing at slashdot? You'd be better served watching NASCAR or a reality show on TV.
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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.
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.
This discussion of idioms is just badong.
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?
you misread my post. you should go back and read it again.
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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.
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.
Got their first what?
I have. When I tell the clients that it's going to cost 25% more to have exactly the same visuals for their 3-versions-old browser, they say "forget the rounded corners for the browsers that can't do it."
Badonka-donk?
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
If you are so intelligent, why are you committing the logical fallacy of broad-brush painting? I am intelligent and literate (or at least my Lit degree would make me think I am) AND I like NASCAR and some reality shows. I also like musicals, heavy metal, opera, ballet, and a variety of other otherwise incongruous-sounding activities.
I do, however, like your comment about the modern notion of the right wing to glorify ignorance and ridicule intellect (thanks GW!).
I do, however, like your comment about the modern notion of the right wing to glorify ignorance and ridicule intellect (thanks GW!).
That was the point of the entire comment; NASCAR was simply an illustration -- no thought required for its enjoyment.
Free Martian Whores!
And I counter with, using stereotypes to illustrate a point about ignorance is itself ignorant.
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).
Everyone is ignorant, not even I know everything!
Free Martian Whores!
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. :)
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.
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.
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.