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

I feel sad.

[gzipped_tar]

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.

Re:I feel sad.

[Pojut]

I don't see how anyone with a dial-up connection could do even casual browsing anymore...most websites nowadays push the 750k-1MB size, if not even bigger. (my own website linked in my sig is even guilty of this, despite my best efforts to keep things minimalistic)

Re:I feel sad.

[jridley]

Start with Slashdot. Of all the sites I visit (not all that many really, only about 30 or 40) Slashdot is the one that makes me wish I had a faster CPU. Clicking into an article with lots of contents on Slashdot will sometimes lock my browser entirely for many seconds, sometimes up to 30 seconds or so.

I'd be a lot happier with the old pre-AJAX version.

Re:I feel sad.

[maxume]

There are preferences to turn on the old version.

I don't want flying images in my browser

[RichMan]

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.

Re:Who understands "throws down Gauntlet"?

[ElectricTurtle]

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.

Re:Who understands "throws down Gauntlet"?

[eddy the lip]

I goodthink his assertion. Goodspeak clear. Unreal wordpics doubleunclear. Unreal wordpics make badthought. Unmodern peoplegroups had unhealth from doubleplusungoodthinking wordpics.

Re:Hey everyone, this is Microsoft!

[noidentity]

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.

Finally, someone is doing this right. I don't know how many times I've wished for hundreds of flying images obscuring the web page content. I was getting bored of just one or two constantly distracting me every time I scrolled or did anything, since they didn't always make me leave the page in disgust. But hundreds, shit yeah. I feel like the time I got one of those five-blade razors. This is one big step to the day they finally bring the Web up to television standards, so that I can confidently avoid it just like I've avoided TV for the last decade. Here's to progress.

Re:Hey everyone, this is Microsoft!

[Skye16]

Because of the complexity of pages now. If you want to stay with no-image, no-javascript, no-flash html, there are fantastic browsers out there that will support your every need. But if you want to do crazy things with your browser like: Ball Pool, then it's going to make that poor browser nom your clock cycles like a morbidly obese person at a buffet.