IE9 Flaunts Hardware-Accelerated Canvas

An anonymous reader writes "Over on the IE blog they have a rundown of IE9's hardware accelerated support for the canvas element. They write, 'With the recent release of the latest IE9 platform preview, we talked about how we're rebuilding the browser to use the power of your whole PC to browse the web, and to unlock a new class of HTML5 applications. One area that developers are especially excited about is the potential of HTML5 canvas. Like all of the graphics in IE9, canvas is hardware accelerated through Windows and the GPU. In this blog post we discuss some of the details behind canvas and the kinds of things developers can build.'"

Comments

If ya got it...

[King InuYasha]

If ya got it... flaunt it!

Re:If ya got it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but you don't know how to program in Linux! Now who's the jealous one?

Re:If ya got it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn right you got a horsecock... It's shoved up your arse.


Fucking trolls.

GO SPEEDRACER GO !!

[Anonymous Coward]

But in the end, did it ever matter?

Re:GO SPEEDRACER GO !!

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried so hard and got so far..

what about the video tag?

[Narcocide]

will ie9 support that?

Re:what about the video tag?

[VGPowerlord]

Er... I'm pretty sure that MS said they would support the video tag back when IE9 was announced. A few months back, they said which format it would support (H.264), although just a week or two ago MS said they would also support WebM if the codec was installed.

Re:what about the video tag?

[cbhacking]

It already does... seriously, it's not like the platform preview is hard to find, or hasn't been discussed in the tech news world lately, or anything like that.

Actually, since Video playback is hardware-accelerated (as with Canvas), it turns out that IE9 handles video streams better than the released browsers that implement it, such as Chrome.

Re:what about the video tag?

[Anonymous Coward]

> it's not like the platform preview is hard to find
it depends on the platfom. still using alpha and ppc and arm soon...

Re:what about the video tag?

[Sycraft-fu]

The video tag will work basically like any MS video setup does: If Windows knows how to play something, meaning the DirectShow codec is installed, then it'll do so. If you have a format that it doesn't know how to play, the codec must be installed. Well, in Windows 7, H.264 is one of the included codecs, WebM is not (which isn't a surprise since it didn't exist when 7 was developed). As such you'd need to install WebM DirectShow codecs.

Works the same for any program that uses DirectShow to play its media, like Windows media player. As an example it doesn't know how to do OGG Vorbis by default. However install the OGG DS codecs and WMP will happily play the files.

So what Google could do, if they wished, is install WebM as part of the Google Toolbar. Then computers would have it ready and IE9 would use it without you have to know why.

Re:what about the video tag?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows Media Player primarily uses Media Foundation, DMOs and the Windows Media framework. DirectShow is only supported as a fallback and is considered obsolete for playback. IE9 will probably only support Media Foundation, and it's not given that it will support any arbitrary decoder you have installed. Microsoft has not said so. They have only said that they will support H.264 and WebM (with a third-party decoder.)

Re:what about the video tag?

[matlhDam]

The video tag will work basically like any MS video setup does: If Windows knows how to play something, meaning the DirectShow codec is installed, then it'll do so.

That's actually not the case in IE 9: for security reasons (well, OK, a bunch of reasons, but reading between the lines, security's the big one), arbitrary codecs aren't supported within the browser. It'll ship only with H.264 support, and they've announced that WebM will be supported as an add-on, but that's it at the moment.

I don't really blame them. It sounds like sandboxing DirectShow codecs might not be as easy as it could be, and IE cops enough security flack as it is (mostly deserved, of course).

Re:what about the video tag?

[cjjjer]

Where have you been? The video tag debate is over seems flash won.

Re:what about the video tag?

[hedwards]

Not really. The problem is that the video tag doesn't have an agreed upon default player nor does it have a way of specifying it as yet. HTML5 in general hasn't been finalized by the W3C, which means that any work done now on it could change somewhat. But more importantly declaring it over when the standard hasn't even been finalized is kind of idiotic.

Re:what about the video tag?

[AnonymouseUser]

Google's YouTube Favors Flash Over HTML5 "...the Adobe Flash Platform will continue to play a critical role in video distribution." The author of the article is biased, not Youtube. A statement of fact does not imply favoritism.

Re:what about the video tag?

[Anonymous Coward]

What? The platform is Windows (naturally, since it's IE). For architectures, Microsoft dropped Alpha and PPC support a long time ago. ARM was never supported (Windows CE/Mobile/Phone doesn't count). The current architecture support for Windows is IA32 (x86 and x86-64) and IA64 (Itanium).

You might as well have mentioned Adobe Photoshop for a PDP-11... it would make about as much sense as your list in 2010.

Re:what about the video tag?

[gig]

> Actually, since Video playback is hardware-accelerated (as with Canvas), it turns out that IE9 handles video streams
> better than the released browsers that implement it, such as Chrome.

No. In the first place, IE9 is a technology demo, not even a browser, not even a beta, it won't be out until more than a year from now at best. They can show you whatever little movie they want to show you. They don't have to support actual websites for actual users with actual batteries and so on.

Secondly, Safari has had hardware accelerated video forever, in actual shipping product, as well as hardware accelerated graphics. This is an ancient Mac, iPad, iPhone, iPod feature. Safari for Windows just got limited hardware acceleration, but it is old elsewhere, but even so, it's shipping now, users are using it. The Mac is the majority of the high-end PC market. Microsoft is not leading the way here. Macs all have hardware H.264 video decoders for this specific reason. Most Macs are notebooks, running video on 10% of the power on the GPU is a key feature. It's great that Microsoft has discovered GPU's in 2010, and HTML5, but let's see some shipping product in the hands of users.

It really goes to show how impractical the nerd community is. The IE9 demo has apparently made a ton of nerds think Microsoft is pushing things ahead. It's a fucking PR campaign! Users are running POS IE6-IE8 and will get no HTML5 until the end of 2011! Look at what is actually out there! What matters is what features you've shipped in a functioning browser. Every browser vendor has next year's tech in the lab.

 

Re:what about the video tag?

[Simetrical]

Where have you been? The video tag debate is over seems flash won.

You should link to the original blog post by Google itself. The conclusion there is "the <video> tag does not currently meet all the needs of a site like YouTube" (emphasis added). So it will remain opt-in on YouTube for now. Nothing rules out a switch in a year or two – all the essential problems they have with <video> are being worked on.

Flash hasn't won. It just hasn't lost quite yet.

I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Quasar1999]

So basically instead of just writing a windows app, people are going to write IE-9 specific HTML 5 extended (or enhanced) pages that load only on Windows systems and pretty much perform the same things a windows app would do (hardware accelerated).

Isn't this a really long roundabout way of just allowing apps to run off the web in a sandbox? Why the smoke and mirrors?

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[bmo]

Why the smoke and mirrors?

See what you wrote above:

So basically instead of just writing a windows app, people are going to write IE-9 specific HTML 5 extended (or enhanced) pages that load only on Windows systems

That.

--
BMO

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[VGPowerlord]

I tried these canvas-based apps on Windows 7 in various browsers.

The ones I tried work in Firefox 3.6.6, Opera 10.60, and Chrome 5.0.375.99.

On Firefox 3.6.6, they're all horrifically slow.

Opera 10.60 worked a little better than Firefox did, but not by much.

Chrome 5.0.375.99 worked about the same as Opera 10.60 did.

Note: My nVidia drivers are from back in November last year, due to a bug in newer nVidia drivers with the game Shattered Horizons. Not sure if that would affect rendering speeds or not.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[mwvdlee]

And this time they would do it not by breaking standards, but by implementing them really well.

Those devious bastards, how dare they!

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Chris Burke]

Uh, well it depends on something that isn't clear to me: Is >canvas< and the specific features thereof they're talking about IE9 specific, or is it part of the html5 standard? If it's part of the standard, but hardware accelerated through IE9, then that's probably okay. Even if it means developers assume an IE9 target and do more with the tag than would be practical to do on non-accelerated browsers. I mean sure IE has a, shall we say, privileged position on Windows, but it's not like other apps can't access the graphics hardware.

If it's IE9-specific extensions to html5, then yeah, that's bullshit.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[ashridah]

Except that the only way to do so will be to use the standard, w3c provided tags... If other browsers accelerate it to (protip, they're working on that), then that's a win for everyone, no matter what.

We're not talking silverlight here, just plain ole html(5)

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[bashmohandes]

Canvas tag is in the HTML 5 proposal

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[bmo]

And this time they would do it not by breaking standards,

You really believe this? Really? After Microsoft abandoning its *own* approved ISO standard for the busted ECMA document standard, the one that never passed ISO?

Shill or gullible. You pick.

--
BMO

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Score Whore]

Maybe you could take your non-IE9 browser to the demo pages linked from the article you'll be able to see if they're doing something standard or something non-standard.

Here's a link:

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Graphics/DeepZoom/Default.html

Rather than telling you what will happen if you go to that page in, say, Safari, I'll let you go ahead and experience it for yourself. Just think of the thrill you'll get when finding that you're totally right that MS just can't do anything to spec, or maybe you'll be thrilled to find that, OMG!!!!, they're adhering to the draft standards as they exist today.

Which do you think it is? The anticipation almost makes you want to pee, doesn't it?

(Next time spend ten seconds to find out before you shoot your mouth off and demonstrate the accuracy of the old saw: "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.")

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[AHuxley]

MS is rewarming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Chrome from the late 1990's.
Now we have the cpu, gpu, bandwidth and OS, they can rebuild that walled garden and milk us all dry again.
Pay per play 3d for the masses done MS style.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[prockcore]

IE9 now passes all of css3info's test suite for CSS3 and HTML5. (That doesn't mean it has 100% support for HTML5/CSS3, just the css3info test suite).

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[VGPowerlord]

Side note:

I installed the IE9 Preview just to see what they would run like in there... they run quite fast.

Then again, MS provided demos aren't exactly the best way to test this.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Korin43]

Why we would want this? The real question is why Microsoft is the one doing this first. What's the point of a canvas tag if we have to go back to rendering everything on the CPU? I have a video card for a reason.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Anonymous Coward]

Try a Firefox 4.0 nightly with Direct2D support:

http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/03/02/presenting-direct2d-hardware-acceleratio

I'd be interested to hear how it compares to IE9 and the other browsers on your system.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Firehed]

Huh? Canvas is canvas. Hardware-accelerated canvas is just faster and smoother to interact with. As a web developer I'm all for hating on IE, but Microsoft has made IE8 fully tolerable and it's looking like IE9 might actually be on the same level of other modern browsers.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Anonymous Coward]

It's mods like this that have made this site indistinguishable from digg. Stay classy Slashdot.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[bmo]

Yeah, it could pass every test suite on the planet, but that doesn't mean they can't *add* their own little bit of kit to "extend" it in an incompatible or even *patented* way. Look at what they did with kerberos, or like, *any other standard* they've dealt with. To Microsoft, "standards are for chumps."

Saying "Microsoft is standards compliant THIS time" is just too much to swallow.

Go ahead, softies, mod this one down too. I have more karma than you.

--
BMO

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[VGPowerlord]

I would try it, but I don't seem to be getting Direct2D rendering... their SVG rotation test page is still really SLOW when I make an image full screen.

Weird thing is, all my addons show up as disabled.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Your.Master]

Passing every test suite on the planet now and in the future would keep me happy.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[andreicio]

It's fine by me if they add bits, as long as they correctly support the existing standards, allowing the designers to create content that works on all borwsers. In a fast evolving browsers world like we have today, added bits have to be pretty convincing to make designers adopt them so fast that the other browsers cannot addapt.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[VGPowerlord]

I should note that this is after I set the font directwrite mode to true and font rendering mode to 6.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[beelsebob]

Uh no, this is a way of coding cross platform, cross browser applications that run on any platform. All MS are pushing here is that IE9 is especially fast at rendering them. It'll take not very long for all the others to catch up.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[beelsebob]

You're forgetting fast here. Remember Active-X? Microsoft supported HTML well back in the day, and extended it with their own active-x... Result, hundreds of websites that wouldn't work cross platform because they used active-x, not html.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[beelsebob]

You have a GPU generally for accelerating 3D things. What microsoft is doing is also accelerating the 2D stuff. For 3D, it's widely expected that WebGL will become the standard for drawing to a canvas, and as it's so so so similar to OpenGL ES 2.0, it's highly unlikely to not be hardware accelerated.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[ShagratTheTitleless]

Direct2D is for Vista and Win7 only. Which begs the question: what the hell was GDI for?

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[kiddygrinder]

to be honest i'm happy to see this whole thing where they're competing without any crutches or advantages, i have nothing against microsoft except their abusing those things, if they make a better browser based on it's own merits then more power to them, about time. if they win then decide it's time to extend, then fuck them, they're gonna get some other company like mozilla screw them over again and it's gonna be a long road back, just like the last time.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[kiddygrinder]

which mods? the downs or the ups? you do realise that it could have been down or up modded since your post? you do realise that what you have just said is basically irrelevant *even as you clicked submit* because it's passive aggressive wittiness makes it indistinguishable from white noise?

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[anss123]

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Graphics/DeepZoom/Default.html

That photo was awesome. Wonder how they took it.

Oddly enough it ran better in IE8 than FF3.6.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[cbhacking]

People look at GPUs for 3D acceleration because that's both the most noticeable improvement vs. software rendering, and because we're still pushing the limits on GPU 3D capability. However, GPUs are also widely used for 2D acceleration, and have been for many years - since before 3D hardware acceleration in conventional PCs was even available. Things that the GPU commonly does to speed 2D up include cursor rendering, font antialiasing, alpha blending, and more. The Direct2D API is just another way to utilize capabilities that are already present in the hardware, and replaces the legacy DirectDraw API which did the same thing. OpenGL has 2D acceleration capabilities as well.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[shutdown -p now]

So basically instead of just writing a windows app, people are going to write IE-9 specific HTML 5 extended (or enhanced) pages that load only on Windows systems and pretty much perform the same things a windows app would do (hardware accelerated).

It's not "HTML5 extended". It's vanilla HTML5, there's nothing special the app has to do to enjoy accelerated canvas and SVG in IE9.

Consequently, an app written that way is still cross-platform. What's more, IE9 is not the only upcoming browser that's going to offer hardware acceleration - Firefox has it in unstable builds already, as well (though on Windows only so far, IIRC), and I believe Chromium is catching up as well?

In any case, the rationale is the same as why Chrome introduced V8, raising the bar for JavaScript performance in the browser significantly.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[shutdown -p now]

The provided demos really specifically test how fast the browser can draw N images (or whatever), with variations (alpha channel, scaling etc). I don't see what's wrong with such a test if you want to specifically test 2D rendering performance.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh? What rock have you been sitting under?
CANVAS is a standard HTML5 element.
Hardware acceleration is coming to, or already is in some browsers.

Why would you NOT want this? Microsoft are actually competing for crying out loud, that is like a miracle if i ever saw one.
The only stupid part about all of this is MS don't seem to be backporting IE9 to XP because "Direct2D" is apparently only possible because the pure AWE of Windows 7...
At least, this was the last time i heard about it, they could well be doing it now since they want as many people away from IE6, which is plain not going to happen since they seem incapable of understanding exactly WHY people still use IE6!
The only people who still have to suffer IE6 is businesses who Microsoft got stuck in the ActiveX trap, which they then killed...

I love that they are adding HWA to it, especially considering how i will be building something around CANVAS pretty soon. IE9 isn't all that bad actually. I wouldn't even mind if they were using that browser anymore as it passes a fair amount of standards to the point where worrying over layout is a very small issue now.
I still personally hate it, the UI is awful.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[shutdown -p now]

Yeah, it could pass every test suite on the planet, but that doesn't mean they can't *add* their own little bit of kit to "extend" it in an incompatible or even *patented* way

You mean, like every other browser out there does? Have you seen how many "-webkit-*" CSS properties are there?

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Spy Hunter]

http://www.xrez.com/yose_proj/Yose_process.html

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Per Wigren]

I'm not sure but it looks like Norway. They probably took like 20 photos and stitched them together.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[shutdown -p now]

Why we would want this? The real question is why Microsoft is the one doing this first.

Being first at something is good for PR, and implicitly casts shadow on the competition. For example, Chrome was first at JITed lighting-fast JavaScript, and that gave it a hefty popularity boost among web developers, and forced other browser vendors to scramble to reimplement their JS engines.

At the same time, canvas (and SVG) acceleration is pretty much pristine ground - and it is also easy to show off with cute demos...

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[jsebrech]

Hardware-accelerated graphics are not a lock-in strategy, just like JIT-ing javascript engines aren't one either. IE9 will run the exact same code as the other guys, it will just run it faster. Notice how these demos are all compatible with all browsers, but just outline how much faster IE's implementation of the same standards is. It's up to the other guys to innovate and catch up. Firefox 4 will have hardware-accelerated graphics, Safari 5 already has it on the mac. Chrome will need to play catch-up for once.

Somebody has to go first with all of these things. The good thing with IE9 is that microsoft isn't playing the proprietary card. You may question their motives, but you can't question the results. IE9 (preview version) is a fast modern browser, with excellent standards support, and few proprietary extensions, aside from legacy support.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[jsebrech]

Saying "Microsoft is standards compliant THIS time" is just too much to swallow.

Cognitive dissonance hurts, but IE9 really is supporting standards well, focusing on open API's, and abandoning proprietary extensions. In IE7, 8 and now 9 they've gradually been disabling proprietary API's, and IE9 in IE9 mode will only have vendor extensions that follow the best practices we've come to expect from all the browser makers (vendor-specific name space, implementing features based on published draft specs).

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[jsebrech]

ActiveX is a plugin API, the other guys all had one (netscape had NPAPI). What people blame microsoft for is ActiveX actually being successful, not the concept of browser plugins. ActiveX was used in apps to do stuff you couldn't do in HTML (and still can't do). Why not hold microsoft accountable for the stuff they did that was actually out of the ordinary? The main thing microsoft did wrong was not the development of proprietary features, but rather the complete lack of development between 2001 and 2006.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Mitchell314]

True, but was it really necessary to introduce the tag? :P

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Anonymous Coward]

Their Windows 8 Project has also been leaked see details here http://yourmediabox.blogspot.com/2010/06/microsoft-wndows-8-plan-leaked.html

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Mitchell314]

What good is moderation and power for if you can't abuse it?

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[True Vox]

Actually, I gotta say - that sounds like a browser that would find support here in our community. Hell, I'd use it! :)

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Anonymous Coward]

They aren't porting anything to XP because it is a discontinued product that is no longer supported except for corporate customers with extended support contracts (although they make the critical security updates for those also available to consumers.)

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[the_one(2)]

Looks very nice and is even quite smooth on my sucky laptop with intel GPU. I got around 24 fps average when scrolling at a not very fast speed in a 1140 x 628 window. I'm running firefox 3.6.6 on ubuntu 10.04

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[vistapwns]

What's wrong is that MS made them, whether the demos are legit or not is irrelevant, see. We must attack MS at every opportunity, whether it's deserved and rational, or not.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[dave420]

And if you're a Firefox fan, there are quite a few moz- CSS properties, too. But I guess that's OK, as neither WebKit or Firefox are from MS... :-P

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Rockoon]

GDI was designed to work with any sort of plotting device, such as printers. The shortcomings of GDI were the reason that the HAL's for windows display devices were designed, the first of which was WinG, and while later incarnations of GDI gave greater performance and some hardware acceleration support, there are now many hardware features that simply cannot be incorporated into GDI.

Things like texture mapping, gradients, alpha blending, etc.. are just not efficient with GDI, and supporting them would only be for a single kind of plotting device (video cards) so it just doesnt make sense to roll those things up into GDI when there are HAL's specifically tailored for those purposes.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[BeardedChimp]

Haha, thanks for making me go to the link.
The waterfall (Yosemite falls) was were I proposed to my Fiancée in March. Brought a smile to my day.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[LordThyGod]

Actually, the problem is that there is such a long history of dishonesty, that there is an equally long history of skepticism and mistrust.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Nerdfest]

Will the other browsers be able to do the same easily (and for other operating systems), or are there only Windows drivers available for much of this hardware? Many of the graphics cards around now under Linux seem to be only partially supported under Linux, and many of the drivers that do have hardware acceleration seem flaky/leaky.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[theolein]

I don't give a flying fuck about Microsoft and most of their business failures over the past few years have been their own fault, but I do like the fact that they are also, under great pressure of becoming irrelevant, moving towards a standards compliant browser.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[pizzach]

Oh, you mean the css properties that are made for developers and may change at any time screwing over your site if you foolishly use them? No thanks.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[g4b]

Nobody has ANY problems if ms enhances css with ie- settings. really. they are welcome!

It's more or like, what you can do with those webkit- and moz- settings. like using css3 features already now. and so on. You can enhance specific browsers without breaking standards.

But MS does not enhance it with obviously local flavour, like naming their own finetuning tags "ms-" or "ie9-" or sth. They do crazy stupid exceptional stuff, that does not reveal itself and reinterprete standard tags breaking compatibility.
And that was horrible and we hope all, they never repeat it.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Bert64]

While nonstandard addons are a problem, nonstandard addons which aren't documented for other people to implement are much worse.
Many of the nonstandard css properties are in-development implementations of new standard features which don't properly comply to the standards yet... Having the beta features under their own properties until they're working correctly is arguably a lot better than having straight broken implementations.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Anonymous Coward]

Not even close to true. You don't write your web app in some special arcane flavor to make use of the hardware acceleration. That's the beauty of it. Even normal font operations go through the GPU. The difference will be that the same standard HTML 5 code will work on all of the browsers. Just, on the ones who don't accelerate it - it will run like shit. Compare current production builds of FF with the IE 9 preview and you'll see this. They all work fine, but FF is very slow. I understand the 3.7 / 4.0 branch has hardware acceleration for FF and it will fix this. All the browsers need to use the GPU if they expect to have decent media performance. And that seems to be what all of them are moving towards. Now - this will mean that Linux folks that want to use this stuff are going to need to be running decently accelerated video drivers. Obviously this can be problematic due to vendors not wanting to release their hardware api.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Anonymous Coward]

The real question is why Microsoft is the one doing this first.

http://linuxhippy.blogspot.com/2010/06/ie9-to-be-gpu-accalerated-firefox-20.html

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean, like every other browser out there does? Have you seen how many "-webkit-*" CSS properties are there?

Thats not quite fair - the Webkit team wraps everything which is part of a standards track but not yet finalized with a webkit prefix, to make it obvious that it is not part of the standard web yet, and could change behavior in the future.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[shutdown -p now]

No, I mean stuff like this which people use today already to make iPhone/iPad-specific websites that break everywhere else.

It's funny how history repeats... MS has considered "-webkit-text-size-adjust" so popular that IE in Windows Phone 7 will support it, despite it not being any kind of standard. Can you say "document.all" and "innerHTML"?

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[shutdown -p now]

Not every property that starts with "-webkit-" is part of the upcoming standards. Some are pure extensions, including some very commonly used ones.

In any event, they're not part of the standard now, and they're already being used, breaking portability.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[pizzach]

I'm not seeing the problem here when using Firefox on that link.

Extensions like -moz were made for testing and use in addons. The addons are hard wired against specific Firefox version numbers giving the devs flexibility in their implementation of their test css extensions between versions. You use them in webpages without fallbacks, you're just asking to shoot yourself in the foot. These things are likely to change or disappear in the future.

MS never removes their extensions for backward compatibility. If they added a -ms-css extension and some big webpages started to use it, they wouldn't remove it for at least 10 years.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Korin43]

Fff can't moderate since I posted, but thanks for posting this. I actually tried the demos in Firefox and they were pretty fast, I just assumed it was because I have a nice processor though.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[shutdown -p now]

I'm not seeing the problem here when using Firefox on that link.

Um, it's not a demo page. It's a book which describes how to make such websites.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Korin43]

I have a GPU for accelerating anything a GPU can accelerate (3D, 2D, physics, video decoding..).

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[ashridah]

Many? Ati has support. Nvidia has support. Intel has support. For what the browser is doing, you'd have to struggle to find a video chipset that *isn't* supported.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[pizzach]

You are linking about future CSS3 tech. Read http://www.jungus.com/b/2010/01/03/what-you-need-to-know-about-behavioral-css. The big issue is if Safari and co don't deprecate their extensions when an official W3C version become available. HTML5 is where we will see this. You do remember that Safari brought us the W3C canvas tag, right?

These Apple css extensions were originally for the iPhone apps that were only supposed to be written in html if I remember. My how things change.

The Webkit guys have not shown me anything that overly makes me thing they are trying to speed us toward a proprietary web yet. They have done mostly the opposite. Fixing their acid test scores and sharing new technologies with the W3C so they can be standardized.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[QuantumBeep]

Not anymore. Non-Windows marketshare is great enough that most websites intended to attract an audience don't include platform-specific elements. We waited a long time for that, you know.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[hellop2]

I noticed something strange. In the thumbnails on the bottom. I click the right-most thumbnail and it zooms in at hi-rez. Any of the other thumbnails zoom in blurry. If I wait, it eventually loads the hi-rez. Bug or....?

Anyways, it's too slow to be usable.

11Mbit down
Firefox 3.6

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[zuperduperman]

that doesn't mean they can't *add* their own little bit of kit to "extend" it in an incompatible or even *patented* way.

Adding extensions to CSS is totally acceptible, even encouraged. All the browser vendors do it. As long as they do it using the blessed means built into the W3C standard there is no problem with that. It is precisely through such means that the standards actually move forward.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[shutdown -p now]

You are linking about future CSS3 tech.

Like I said, not all "-webkit-*" properties are part of the CSS3 standard, or even drafts. In fact, not all of them are even in WebKit trunk - some of that stuff Apple keeps to itself. I dare you to find "text-size-adjust" in any CSS3 draft. While you're at it, RTFM, and pay attention to numerous references to "optimizing for iPhone". You may also find this discussion on W3 mailing lists interesting.

And that is something that is heavily used already, not some abstract future problem.

So, yes, it really is "embrace & extend" all over again, and this time Apple is doing it. It's just that they've got awesome marketing, so much so that most geeks are absolutely convinced that it is all about HTML5 and standards in general.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[perryizgr8]

now use it in ie9. its much faster, quite usable.
and thats the point in making html demos. you can compare browsers on their rendering, speed and smoothness.
not like the horribly shitty and locked down apple demos.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[JackieBrown]

The fact that all the HTML 5 stuff that I have tried that were not provided by MS makes me wonder if these are legit.

That said, the asteroids one they linked to ran as fast as a native app in my chrome nightly build (I use the nightly build because they come in a self contained zip file which allows me to get around the no-install restrictions from my work which still uses ie6)
http://www.kevs3d.co.uk/dev/asteroids/

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[DaVince21]

Euugh. I'm sure that demo could be a lot faster in other browsers. Aren't they doing anything sneaky in the background code?

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[pizzach]

Believe what you want. Safari and Firefox have been pulling which direction the CSS level 3 standard was going by creating live examples. Given the background of Webkit on supporting W3C code, the size of webkit share market share as compared to Firefox and Explorer, and the fervor that extensions have been happening, things call for cautious optimism. Not tin foil hats.

Do you remember the opacity css attribute? All modern browsers support -opacity now. Safari went from -khtml-opacity to -webkit-opacity to -opacity. You're playing with fire as long as you do not use the W3C official equivalent. Speaking of which, have you seen all the depricated mozilla css styles lately?

Just like the mozilla equivalents, the Safari equivalents were mostly created for internal usage. Why the hell do people think Apple was seriously pushing html as an alternative to native application development for the iphone? Does no one remember that Mac OS X dashboard widgets are written in html too? Selective memories I guess... Not really any different than the usage of the Mozilla extensions.

I'll say it again, but cautious optimism is called for. You act like a tin foil hat and people will ignore you.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Simetrical]

Uh, well it depends on something that isn't clear to me: Is >canvas< and the specific features thereof they're talking about IE9 specific, or is it part of the html5 standard? If it's part of the standard, but hardware accelerated through IE9, then that's probably okay. Even if it means developers assume an IE9 target and do more with the tag than would be practical to do on non-accelerated browsers. I mean sure IE has a, shall we say, privileged position on Windows, but it's not like other apps can't access the graphics hardware.

If it's IE9-specific extensions to html5, then yeah, that's bullshit.

All the new IE9 features they've showcased are in open standards and already implemented interoperably by other browsers. IE9's <canvas> demos work perfectly fine in all other browsers – but they're much slower due to the lack of hardware acceleration. Actually, IE9's Standards Mode even removes some proprietary IE extensions from earlier versions (e.g., JS extensions; scroll down to "Same Script, Same Markup").

Microsoft is now actually trying to beat the other browsers by being actually better, as they did with IE6, so they can regain lost market share. They have the advantage that their browser only works on one platform, so they can rely on Vista/7-only APIs like Direct2D and DirectX 10 while other browsers need to support OpenGL, DirectX 9, etc.

In other words: be afraid. The enemy has learned from its defeat.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[shutdown -p now]

I don't actually mind "embrace & extend", truth be told, so long as the basic standard is supported. After all, this has been the case with C/C++ compilers pretty much for as long as they existed - with the FOSS one, GCC, offering perhaps the widest variety of extensions - and the sky hasn't fallen. In some cases, useful extensions have propagated from one compiler to others (e.g. "#pragma once").

I do see a problem in the fact that some extensions are offered that enable people to "optimize" websites for a particular platform - this reeks of "best viewed in IE6" all over again. But this is more of an artifact of mobile Safari's disproportional market share today than issue with extensions as such.

My point is that it doesn't make sense to criticize MS for providing HTML extensions in IE, and not retiring their old extensions, while completely ignoring the fact that other browser vendors - and most notably Apple - do the same. It was in reply to this post.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[pizzach]

I agree that we don't need another "best viewed in" web built up, but you're comparing apples to oranges.

It all comes down to MS having their history which makes people more afraid of them. Not to mention that their rendering engine is closed sourced and not cross-platform. I can't think of a worse place for new technologies to appear from. If IE starts having extensions, people can't even see the source code to see how they did it. They haven't even been working with the W3C on standards since around IE5 from what I can tell.

MS doesn't even try to fake being a team player.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Anonymous Coward]

They haven't even been working with the W3C on standards since around IE5 from what I can tell.

Then you obviously don't know how to read. Get a fucking clue and do some research before you got posting such bullshit.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[jim_v2000]

It's HTML5...any retard can go look at the source to see if there's any shenanigans going on.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[LordThyGod]

Like they are adhering to some specs and completely fucking with others (that aren't in their hand crafted test suite)? I doubt it.

Too bad for IE9...

[phizi0n]

Firefox 4.0 betas are slightly faster than IE9 previews using the same hardware acceleration API's (Direct2D and Directwrite).

Re:Too bad for IE9...

[Anonymous Coward]

I really don't think FireFox will ever be faster in this area exactly because of the overhead of its cross platform nature

chrome. 'nuff said.

Re:Too bad for IE9...

[agnosticnixie]

Chrome doesn't use anything that is as cross-platform as XUL, its elements (esp. the engine; yes it's webkit but it's not the exact same version of webkit everywhere) are more local.

Re:Too bad for IE9...

[colinrichardday]

however I really don't think FireFox will ever be faster in this area exactly because of the overhead of its cross platform nature, IE on the other hand, can utilize DirectX & Windows API

How is utilizing DirectX and the Windows API going to make IE9 faster than FF on Linux?

Or doesn't that count?

Re:Too bad for IE9...

[bashmohandes]

Who cares about Linux, we're talking about Windows, when the 93% of the world talks, the other 1% should shut the fuck up.

Re:Too bad for IE9...

[bashmohandes]

Chrome is native on all platforms, why do you think it took it years to finally release on Linux & Max while it was already released 5 versions on Windows

Re:Too bad for IE9...

[bashmohandes]

Chrome is native on all platforms, why do you think it took it years to finally release on Linux & Max while it was already released 5 versions on Windows

sorry a typo I meant "Mac"

Re:Too bad for IE9...

[DaVince21]

That doesn't make sense. Since when do cross-platform apps *have to* be any slower than platform-specific apps? Sure, they may run better or worse among different platforms, but that's a different comparison than the one phizi0n was making.

Re:Too bad for IE9...

[colinrichardday]

Who cares about Linux, we're talking about Windows, when the 93% of the world talks, the other 1% should shut the fuck up.

a) Firefox is also faster on Mac than IE8, and I suspect IE9.

b) Then maybe that 93% should "talk" by not simply accepting the OS that comes with Their PCs.

Re:Too bad for IE9...

[bashmohandes]

IE8 doesn't run on Mac.

Re:Too bad for IE9...

[bashmohandes]

These are simple facts of programming, if you don't understand them too bad for you.

Re:Too bad for IE9...

[colinrichardday]

Yep, so that would make Firefox faster, wouldn't it?

Re:Too bad for IE9...

[bashmohandes]

Nope.

Re:Too bad for IE9...

[colinrichardday]

And how is Internet Explorer 8 faster than Firefox on Mac?

Re:Too bad for IE9...

[bashmohandes]

There is no comparison, you can't compare IE & FF on Mac OS period

Re:Too bad for IE9...

[colinrichardday]

Firefox runs on Mac OS; Internet Explore 8 doesn't (not natively, anyway, there's always Boot Camp).

that is a comparison.

Re:Too bad for IE9...

[bashmohandes]

Firefox runs on Mac OS; Internet Explore 8 doesn't (not natively, anyway, there's always Boot Camp).

that is a comparison.

So you want to compare a native application with a virtualized application on terms of Performance, NICE

Re:Too bad for IE9...

[colinrichardday]

Hey, Microsoft could make IE8 native, but they chose not too. As for comparing a native with a virtualized application, if the only way to run the app is virtually, then yes, it's as fair a comparison as one can get.

Re:Too bad for IE9...

[bashmohandes]

Actually IE used to run on Mac OSX as part of a deal between Apple & Microsoft back in 1997, and it was releasing for a while till apple choose to not renew the deal with MS and to start its own Browser.

A house built on sand cannot stand.

[stavrica]

We developed a web based game BattleCell that uses Ajax/CSS instead of Flash for all the heavy lifting. We discover at least one new bug in the IE rendering engine every month. Our pile of IE bugs in the back room that we have to track every time we develop a new feature is testament to the dread with which we view this new hardware-based rendering engine. We know what we're doing.

Just last week, we learned that once you have a stack of enough semi-transparent layers (combination of PNGs with alpha channels coupled with DIVs with various opacity CSS settings), IE fails to render the top-most layers. This doesn't happen after 20-30 layers. This happens after 5-7 layers. At first we thought our code was faulty, until we realized that scrolling down such a page with multiple layers will cause text that was previously "invisible" to suddenly be rendered in its specified color... as we kept scrolling, the text would then disappear again. You get the idea.

Obviously, this all works flawlessly in Safari, Chrome, Opera. For IE, we get to re-architect all sorts of work-arounds --a house built on sand.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe should just opensource and not open spec their flash player. The money is in the tools and not the playback software. Chock it up in to HTML 5 spec integration and be done with it. That way people are starting from a point that has everything html5 offer.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[MikeFM]

Just drop IE support. It's not worth the effort. At least I wouldn't bother with anything alter than the newest version. Unfortunately IE still makes up half the visitors to my none geek sites but non-IE8 has dropped down to under 10% and those users convert to less revenue than other users.. so I've gradually dropped support. Nothing new is being tested for old versions of IE. I'm seeing the dropoff from IE accelerating as a whole. Firefox is at about 25%, Chrome and Safari make up another 15%, and Opera and iPod/iPhone/iPad/Android devices most of the rest. The speed of Chrome and mobile device growth is most impressive. Seriously considering versions formatted to the screen sizes of popular mobile devices.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[naoursla]

Are you entering the bugs you find at connect.microsoft.com?

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[tokul]

Obviously, this all works flawlessly in Safari, Chrome, Opera. For IE, we get to re-architect all sorts

Welcome to web developer world. Standard complaint code usually works in most of browsers and IE is always an exception.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[Anonymous Coward]

submit bug reports to a non-open source browser. Why bother?

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[silanea]

You do realise that Flash is hated not only, and not even most prominently, for being closed but for being a technical nightmare?

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[agnosticnixie]

So IE8 is still beta?

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because just like any piece of software if it isn't reported it isn't likely to be fixed. Open source has zero to do with trying to improve the quality of a product. You don't need to see the source to submit a bug report.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your list of bugs would be extremely valuable to the IE team. I suggest sending it along, or at least seeing if they're addressed with the IE9 platform preview build.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[Anonymous Coward]

And give them bug tracking services for free for their closed source, for-profit software?

Funny guy.

Either they pay for every

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[shaitand]

The game is a great idea. I suggested a similar game concept to someone on Evony maybe a year ago. Props on building it, I look forward to playing.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[am 2k]

Just last week, we learned that once you have a stack of enough semi-transparent layers (combination of PNGs with alpha channels coupled with DIVs with various opacity CSS settings), IE fails to render the top-most layers. This doesn't happen after 20-30 layers. This happens after 5-7 layers.

You're right that this is a bug. However, please also consider that your workaround has an additional bonus: Even when it works, drawing so many layers on top of each other ("overdraw" in computer graphics lingo) is a great performance strain. You might not notice it on your superfast gaming PC, but please also consider slower devices like netbooks, mobile phones and tablets. The iPad would probably render it correctly, but I guess at a single frame per second, maybe even less.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[Rogerborg]

Are you entering the bugs you find at connect.microsoft.com?

Last time I wanted to report a bug to Microsoft, they tried to bill me for "support". OK, it was 15 years ago, but I'm not much minded to go back and see if they've stopped beating their customers. It still hurts, man. It still hurts.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[kiddygrinder]

lol, i'm pretty sure even viewing the flash source gives you scabies.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[Anonymous Coward]

I see it was an actual error in IE then. I thought it was just me that screwed up.
I had a bunch of semi-transparent layers that contained textured tiles as well. Tiling gaming engine not too far away from the same style you have actually.
I just couldn't for the life of me figure out what the hell was going on with IE.

I wouldn't have came across the scrolling part you mentioned though since my grid was automatically resized according to screen resolution. (which is a bit of a mess at the moment anyway, trying to figure out a better way to go about the resizing)

Projects on hold for the moment anyway, working on CANVAS to see how well it can handle it instead, at least with CANVAS i could have finer control over the layers directly in code rather than leaving it up to the browsers layout engine.
And this announcement makes me happy too since i won't need to worry about IE users being behind. (outside of those who have to suffer IE6 that is... )

I shall need to try that game out too, looks pretty damn nice. Very impressed.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[Tei]

I share this type of experiences. IE is a bad program.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[Saint Stephen]

Yeah, because a bug in some obscure corner case means the whole product is shit right? There are buglists for all those products. People didn't used to write web pages like that, give em a break

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[drinkypoo]

Yeah, because a bug in some obscure corner case

Z-Index plus transparency is not a corner case. They're both major features of the specified feature set. If you can argue with a straight face that Z-Index (part of CSS) or transparency (part of various file formats) failing is a corner case, it proves only that you are some sort of advanced apologist and liar or completely ignorant. IE is the ONLY browser which doesn't make standards compliance a major selling point. What more do you need to know about Microsoft's 3E strategy?

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[Anonymous Coward]

for someone like you flash might be a nightmare but for the millions of actionscript developers out there it seems to be quite useful :)

the reality is that for the end-user html5 means zilch. they'll continue using flash and won't even hear people like you as you whine from the sidelines.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[bakuun]

Last time I reported a bug to Microsoft, they thanked me and let me know that they'd fix it for the next update. I checked it the next time it was updated, and the bug was fixed.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, people are starting to build their houses on huge piles of sand because they moderate the temperature very nicely and reduce the need to heating and cooling. Also, Flash is not closed... Technical nightmare, maybe so if you don't know Flash, which I'm assuming you don't.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[Saint Stephen]

Gp said he was stacking a large # of them, in a new way that no app ever did, that makes it a corner case

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[drinkypoo]

Gp said he was stacking a large # of them, in a new way that no app ever did, that makes it a corner case

No, he said he was stacking a moderate number of them when IE failed, while other browsers did not fail with a large number of them.

It doesn't matter HOW many you add, if the spec permits you to add them, it should NEVER fail simply because you added one more, unless you've run out of all system memory. Failing when you have just a handful of these layers points to a truly sophomoric mistake.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're preaching to the choir brotha! Our poor designers always have to change their styles around for IE. Other than IE, their main CSS displays the same on FIrefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[HyperQuantum]

Just last week, we learned that once you have a stack of enough semi-transparent layers (combination of PNGs with alpha channels coupled with DIVs with various opacity CSS settings), IE fails to render the top-most layers. This doesn't happen after 20-30 layers. This happens after 5-7 layers.

You're right that this is a bug. However, please also consider that your workaround has an additional bonus: Even when it works, drawing so many layers on top of each other ("overdraw" in computer graphics lingo) is a great performance strain. You might not notice it on your superfast gaming PC, but please also consider slower devices like netbooks, mobile phones and tablets. The iPad would probably render it correctly, but I guess at a single frame per second, maybe even less.

Good point. And the IE devs probably thought something like: 5 layers of (semi-)transparent layers ought to be enough for anyone.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[Rogerborg]

So it's true: if you stick with them, and love them enough, they can change!

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have no willingness to engage the developers of IE9, NOW, while they are developing the product, then you are a complete idiot.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft asks for your credit card when you call support. If it's a bug, they don't charge you. If it's you being stupid, they do.

Otherwise, imagine the scenario.

Customer: My computer doesn't work
MS: Is it turned on?
Customer: Oh, you fixed it!
MS: That will be a pay incident, can i have your credit ca...
Customers:Click

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[Saint Stephen]

Duh, that's why it's a bug! How's the state of sound playback on Linux? All these browsers have bugs. People didnt used to make such heavy use of that technique, don't be so pissy. Guess what, software has bugs. File it just like you would any debian package.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[drinkypoo]

Duh, that's why it's a bug! How's the state of sound playback on Linux? All these browsers have bugs. People didnt used to make such heavy use of that technique, don't be so pissy. Guess what, software has bugs. File it just like you would any debian package.

We're not arguing over whether it's a bug, but whether it's a corner case. It's the kind of thing that should have been caught before it went out the door because the whole point of having a hardware-accelerated canvas is being able to do things like have a crapload of layers with transparent objects on them.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[Saint Stephen]

That's in ie9 unrealeased. Like bitchiness about bugs in Sid, it's Sid.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[Phroggy]

The last time I reported a bug to Microsoft, they told me I was the only customer they knew who actually understood how the stuff worked. I have mixed feelings about that.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[Anonymous Coward]

(Posted as AC because I'm away from my regular machine and don't have my /. password memorized.)

Use Google's Chrome Frame! http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/

Chrome Frame frees you from ever having to deal with IE. I've been using it on http://www.twitgrids.com for many months. I've never had a single complaint. The people who are running IE aren't the type to balk at a quick and easy plugin install.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[uninformedLuddite]

Thanks for that Steve

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[uninformedLuddite]

On principle I would not give MS my CC number when reporting a bug. Has anyone actually spoken to some of the morons that work there? Some of their employees are good but some I wouldn't trust to package my cheeseburger.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[silanea]

The "end-user" does not give a flying rat's ass about Flash or HTML 5. They use a website and whatever software is required to view it. The majority of users has no idea what Flash is or whether they have it installed or whether they are "using" it right now on a website.

The vast majority of end-users is not part of the debate. Developers are.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[silanea]

I have yet to see a single non-niche or demo website implemented in Flash that does not have serious disadvantages to a comparable website implemented in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. From printing to links to scrolling to scaling to navigation.

Now I would usually attribute such an observation to stupid developers, not to an inadequacy of the tools. It is possible to write secure web applications in PHP, after all, even though the majority of projects in this language are essentially bundled security holes. But with Flash I have to wonder whether the technology simply does not lend itself to sane development and design practises.

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[Simetrical]

We developed a web based game BattleCell that uses Ajax/CSS instead of Flash for all the heavy lifting. We discover at least one new bug in the IE rendering engine every month.

Since this article is about IE9: have you tried it in IE9? Did it work there?

Re:A house built on sand cannot stand.

[Robert Zenz]

Last three times I reported a bug to Microsoft I became the following answers (and only those answers, directly closed afterwards):

• Not our department.
• Can't reproduce it.
• Happens on to less machines, we won't fix that one.

just the canvas?

[thoughtsatthemoment]

Why not build the entire browser in OpenGL or DirectX for computers with a capable graphics card?

Re:just the canvas?

[phizi0n]

The whole browser is hardware accelerated by the new Direct2D and Directwrite API's. It's just that the biggest noticeable advantage is the speedup of the canvas element which is used to manipulate a lot of graphics. Firefox nightly alphas had it working before the first IE9 preview was released and it will be in FF 4.0. Firefox devs are also working on OpenGL acceleration for other platforms but that's much further away.

Re:just the canvas?

[ashridah]

You do realize that that's what Direct2D and DirectWrite essentially are, right? Ways to render lines and fonts using the hardware instead of software rasterisers? There's no point in making the entire thing an opengl surface, however, when you can create APIs that give you finer-grained control over things than that.

Re:just the canvas?

[naoursla]

All of the graphics in IE9 are build on top of Direct2D (including SVG). It is not just the canvas.

Re:just the canvas?

[0123456]

You do realize that that's what Direct2D and DirectWrite essentially are, right? Ways to render lines and fonts using the hardware instead of software rasterisers?

Wow! You mean like we were doing on Windows 3.0 in 1990?

When the heck did Windows _stop_ being hardware accelerated?

Re:just the canvas?

[thoughtsatthemoment]

I was thinking more of a true 3D environment to take full advantage of the graphics card, like shaders. We don't need or want to read text on a cube, but 3D transitional effects would be nice. Also it might be easier to support WebGL. For firefox, an OpenGL browser would probably share more code across platforms.

Re:just the canvas?

[Rogerborg]

These children don't remember when Direct2D and DirectWrite were called DirectDraw, and accelerated 2D was all the hot shizzle the first time round. In another 20 years, this lot of noobs will laughing in turn at the new lot of noobs wetting their sweatpants over DirectFlatOGram, or whatever they're calling the accelerated 2D API by then.

Re:just the canvas?

[shaitand]

I think he meant gpu accelerated vs calculating all those lines and changes with the cpu and then sending the commands to draw them.

Re:just the canvas?

[put_it_down]

How about one built with CUDA support?

Re:just the canvas?

[The MAZZTer]

And Chrome has it's own experimental hardware acceleration in the dev branch.

Re:just the canvas?

[Anonymous Coward]

It was decelerated in Vista, of course. The old way accelerated GDI, which is a rather ancient API that provides lines and fonts, but not the nicest lines and fonts possible. Then re-accelerated in Windows 7.

But Direct2D and DirectWrite do better by being more modern and providing nicer APIs with more capabilities. Useful capabilities at that. One of the most compelling examples is text; compare the appearance of text in IE9 (using DirectWrite) to other browsers on Windows. The font shapes are much nicer; it ends up having shapes that are almost as good as Mac OS X while maintaining the much easier legibility of Windows text.

Re:just the canvas?

[thoughtsatthemoment]

I did realize that Direct2D is not for XP. And MS definitely realized if they used OpenGL or Direct3D to implement IE9, they would have no excuse for not making IE9 available on XP. MS is doing a superb job at controlling technology on their platform, as always.

Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[MikeFM]

It's fast but can it render the page correctly? It doesn't much matter how fast it is if it doesn't do it right. IE8 is still a big turd - have they actually fixed IE9 or is it all smoke and mirrors by posting speed results? The last results I saw proved that they could pass the tests they wanted to pass but that they failed horribly at real world results. I guess if it's good enough for the education system then it's good enough for web browsers eh?

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[Z00L00K]

And when they say that they want to use all PC resources - are they really providing anything useful with that or are they just going to hog the whole computer?

Maybe Microsoft should take a course in how to write efficient and safe code first. By integrating and using a lot of features like GPU:s and other stuff you will also limit which platforms the software can be used on as well as building a solution that contains a complexity that can be hard to grasp and maintain in the long run. A great opportunity for malware producers because they can now start to scan for new interesting attack vectors in a solution.

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[value_added]

And when they say that they want to use all PC resources - are they really providing anything useful with that or are they just going to hog the whole computer?

For me, a browser is mostly a clumsy way to find and read documentation, buy shit, or waste time on Slashdot. For an increasing majority, it seems, a web browser is everything.

By integrating and using a lot of features like GPUs and other stuff you will also limit which platforms the software can be used on ...

For Microsoft, there can be only one platform. That's not to say they've "evolved" over the years, but any positive steps they've taken toward openness have been mostly the result of factors and developments they've not (yet) been able to control, and only begrudgingly accepted.

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[Anonymous Coward]

The actual article is a long blog post arguing that it is providing something useful -- a large performance boost for canvas (and SVG on previous posts).

Earlier articles actually seem to be demonstrating that by using the whole computer, they are hogging less of it because they aren't wasting CPU time on tasks much better suited to the GPU. They have all kinds of nifty graphs where Chrome, Safari, and Firefox are pegging the CPU and idling the GPU and getting low FPS, whereas IE has high FPS and has staccato spikes on the CPU and GPU.

Microsoft isn't the only browser doing this sort of thing. Firefox and Opera have betas working toward it.

I don't get why so many people on slashdot seem so adequately opposed to using a computer to do computer things. It's just weird to insist that browsers should continue to operate with their hands tied behind their backs. SVG and Canvas are exactly the sort of things that GPUs are designed to work with efficiently rather than the GPU. It's almost silly to implement modern standards without such things. I see the same attitude with RAM. At the far extreme there's that one guy who makes hard-to-read anonymous posts who keeps going on about the 15 MB of hard drive space he loses in his HOSTS file by not being able to summarize an IPv4 0.0.0.0 address as 0. Or some damn thing.

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[hairyfeet]

Glad to see I'm not the only one thinking PC resources are there to be used not to just sit there. One of the things I like the most about Windows 7 is that unlike XP my RAM actually is being used for something useful, instead of sitting empty most of the time. I have about 500Mb of my 8Gb free, because thanks to Superfetch Windows knows which programs I use and when and has them waiting in RAM for me.

I fell the same about the GPU, I have a GB of RAM and a fast stream processor sitting there and if I'm not gaming use the thing! But while I have been personally playing with IE9 and it is shaping up to have some cool features, I'm too hooked on FF to give it up. The guy at Mozilla that invented the extension framework needs to be given a company car and a big fat raise, because they couldn't have asked for a better lockin! Once you have a set of extensions you like giving it up is VERY hard. Even my dad who is about as clueless when it comes to PCs as they come is hooked. When he visits a relative that doesn't have FF he calls me to walk them through "giving them something that doesn't suck like that damned blue E" because he simply can't stand the web without ABP and Imagezoom.

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[stiller]

Their Acid3 score has gone up from 68/100 to 83/100 since the last platform preview, so yeah, it seems they're definitely making progress. IE8 only scored 20/100.

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Glad to see I'm not the only one thinking PC resources are there to be used not to just sit there.

Yeah, nothing I'd like better than hearing my laptop's fan kick in every time I open IE.

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[jsebrech]

It's fast but can it render the page correctly? It doesn't much matter how fast it is if it doesn't do it right. IE8 is still a big turd - have they actually fixed IE9 or is it all smoke and mirrors by posting speed results?

That isn't my experience at all. My experience is that IE8 got the basics right. They support CSS2 as well as the other guys, or better. Yes, it didn't support next-gen web standards, but most of those weren't even standards when IE8 was in development. With IE9 it's all about the next-gen standards (CSS3, HTML5, canvas).

Many people seem to look at acid 3's score and assume that IE8 is a turd because of that, but as a web developer I have no major issues with IE8. Generally speaking, I can develop web apps without having to take extra precautions for IE8, unlike what I have to do with IE6 and 7.

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[jdb2]

One of the things I like the most about Windows 7 is that unlike XP my RAM actually is being used for something useful, instead of sitting empty most of the time. I have about 500Mb of my 8Gb free, because thanks to Superfetch Windows knows which programs I use and when and has them waiting in RAM for me.

Linux has this as well. It's called Preload.

jdb2

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[marcello_dl]

In fact, no matter the average slashdotter bias, Microsoft has all the resources to make fully compliant products. Problem is, that is not a goal for them. Market domination is. That's why I prefer to base my stuff on free software, and that's why I prefer FF and Opera over chrome safari and IE. Putting Opera in the same league of Firefox, because Opera has not enough power to unilaterally extend standards, so compliance is a primary goal for them. Chrome in the same league of safari and IE because Chrome is part of a broader strategy like the other browsers are for apple and MS. I'm not calling any of them evil or good, I simply look for the best tool for the job and do it on the long term.

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[Neil Hodges]

Does IE8 support application/xhtml+xml, which has been around since 1998 or so?

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[coryking]

Ah sourceforge, where good projects go to die.

Last update on Preload? 2009-04-15. More than a year ago.

Until it is build into the kernel, I'll pass, thanks.

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[HermMunster]

Bullshit. That's moronic. If you think it is a good project, go there and revive it, so to speak.

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[HermMunster]

Let's use it so nothing else can. Oh, and btw, let's just use it to heat things up, consume more power, and make the system overall less responsive. And, let's use it just to use it because it is there.

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you can load the whole damn OS into RAM (Puppy, DSL, make this trivially easy).

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[fluffy99]

The guy at Mozilla that invented the extension framework needs to be given a company car and a big fat raise, because they couldn't have asked for a better lockin!

True the notion of extensions wasn't new, but it was the saving grace for Firefox. Now they just need to go back and implement it correctly, so that extensions can't hang the whole browser.

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[jdb2]

Until it is build into the kernel, I'll pass, thanks.

It's your loss. I have 8 gigs of DDR3-1600MHz and preload is running right now, keeping my most used loadable libraries and applications in a large portion of that 8 gigs and with a very noticeable effect on program startup time.

There are many drivers that are not built into the kernel. Perhaps you would like to "pass" on those as well.

jdb2

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[cbhacking]

Quick note: while ABP as such hasn't been ported, IE does have a number of extensions, including ad blocking. The one I use most is actually a sort of meta-extension - it includes everything from ad blocking to mouse gestures to a download manager - but it does the job really well, and is still under development (last release was a month ago). Don't be fooled by the name; it works on anything IE6 to IE8 (although some of the features won't work on 6 or are redundant on 8). http://ie7pro.com/

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[AmberBlackCat]

I personally think Microsoft tries to kill computer resources on purpose, maybe to get people to buy new computers and copies of Windows. I think this because every time a new version of Windows comes out, it somehow takes up much more memory than the previous one, without doing many new things. I can't help but think the way they designed the registry to get bigger and slower, until it grinds the computer to a halt, was not an accident. They couldn't be that stupid. And soon after people started finding ways to use the graphics hardware for software execution, Microsoft made the window manager start to use up the graphics accelerator. Now they're making IE do it. They'll keep going until they kill the graphics card the way they've killed everything else. And the only reason Windows 7 doesn't suck too is because that one was my idea. But this applies to all the Windows versions before it.

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[Anonymous Coward]

More like let's use it because nothing else is using it. Let's use it because it makes our PC faster, more responsive and productive. Let's use it because if we don't, then it's essentially dead hardware and a waste of money.

And tell me something. What wastes more energy, a PC that uses less energy but takes a long time to do things or a PC that uses more energy and takes a short time to do those same things?

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[QuantumBeep]

Really, I think it's legit to observe that a project is dead. It doesn't obligate you to go revive it (there aren't any sentient programs yet).

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[Anonymous Coward]

BUD LIGHT PRESENTS: REAL MEN OF GENIUS. This is for you, Mr. Install-a-huge-addon-to-make-Internet-Explorer-operate-like-a-different-browser-instead-of-just-switching.

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[QuantumBeep]

It's not enough to be "good enough" anymore. With several great browsers to choose from that do vastly more, vastly better, IE8 is just code down the drain.

Or I wish it was. I still can't get my actually-highly-technically-literate parents to use anything else. Maybe IE is something I won't understand until I get older.

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[MikeFM]

You must never do anything very interesting. Constantly our company has to back off anything advanced because IE has serious issues. And I'm not talking CSS3, HTML5, canvas, etc. Frequently it's not just wrong behavior it's behavior that changes depending on the situation such as to many elements on screen.

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[MikeFM]

It's like wearing a wool suit in the summer. Old men seem to delight in that sort of self punishment.

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[Simetrical]

In fact, no matter the average slashdotter bias, Microsoft has all the resources to make fully compliant products. Problem is, that is not a goal for them. Market domination is.

Circa IE8, they realized that making a fully-compliant browser is the best immediate strategy for market domination. And that's exactly what they're doing for IE9. Their explicit goal for IE9 is to make it work with all the sites that other browsers work for, without IE-specific hacks, and so far they seem to be doing a remarkably good job of it.

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[BikeHelmet]

Glad to see I'm not the only one thinking PC resources are there to be used not to just sit there. One of the things I like the most about Windows 7 is that unlike XP my RAM actually is being used for something useful, instead of sitting empty most of the time. I have about 500Mb of my 8Gb free, because thanks to Superfetch Windows knows which programs I use and when and has them waiting in RAM for me.

I'd be fine with things like superfetch if there was a way to signal apps to dump non-essential memory when it's needed. And also a way to signal them to STOP HOGGING I/O.

But as is, slimmed down XP feels faster than Win7.

Not using resources may be a waste, but the algorithms aren't perfected yet, so that's what I choose.

Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds?

[hairyfeet]

Actually there is, and it works on XP too. Here you go, it allows you to turn it off, clear the cache, or set whether to be app, boot, or both. Funny that you think XP is faster, as I have been upgrading some pretty old systems to Windows 7 and they all seem to be a good 20%+ faster. I just came back from checking on my oldest boy's new Win 7 x86 HP upgrade this afternoon, and he can't quit raving about how much more responsive his MMO is now compared to XP. And this is an old 3.6Ghz P4 with 2Gb of DDR 400 and an old 7600GS 512Mb card.

With superfetch plus readyboost using a 4Gb file on an 8Gb flash he can't quit talking about how it is like "getting a new PC" because everything loads just as quick as he can click it thanks to superfetch and readyboost. Perhaps you didn't use readyboost? Because I've found that even on this quad with 8Gb of DDR2 800 that readyboost with the fast SSD read speed really lets your programs fly. With 4-8Gb flash drives so cheap maybe you ought to give Windows 7 a partition on your drive and give it another go. After the suck that was Vista I kept my XP partition just in case, but since switching in Oct the only time I boot into XP now is to use an old DVD Creator app that simply won't run on x64. With everything else the faster speed of 7 just makes XP feel like a giant step backwards.

Does IE9 Support Web Standards or Dump ActiveX?

[zunipus]

Do Windows box users still have to wait for IE to catch up with Web standards? Or does MS still FLAUNT its use of non-standard web code?

Does IE9 dump ActiveX? Is that security scourge of the Internet finally dead and gone? Or will IE9 users still be victims of ActiveX malware?

Re:Does IE9 Support Web Standards or Dump ActiveX?

[Z00L00K]

Even worse - they will be victims of new invented features by Microsoft that opens new interesting holes that nobody can think of yet.

Re:Does IE9 Support Web Standards or Dump ActiveX?

[fat_mike]

You mean standards like Flash and other rich content pages that don't make IE choke and take three minutes to load like Firefox?

You mean standards like full screen non-jerky/tearing video?

You mean standards like actually asking you if you want to upgrade instead of starting Firefox and five minutes later finally realizing that its taking so long because its upgrading and didn't tell you then every time you start it it brings up a restore session page along with its two minute loading :Choose your persona page" which takes so long to load because it chokes on "web standards"?

Or do you mean your standards like the fact that I have exactly four tabs open and Firefox is currently using 218,380 K and the plugin-container is using 209,572 K?

Cause my standards call for things to work. Kind of like IE 8 is doing right now with the same four tabs open and only using 91,912 K or RAM while Firefox is now at 216,652 and 213,905

Yes, lets dump ActiveX! Hell, why not just go back to Gopher!

Re:Does IE9 Support Web Standards or Dump ActiveX?

[agnosticnixie]

Your ridiculous whining has nothing to do with standards, or with activex.

Re:Does IE9 Support Web Standards or Dump ActiveX?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eat a standard 9 inch dick you fat piece of shit teabagger.

Re:Does IE9 Support Web Standards or Dump ActiveX?

[cbhacking]

You seem badly misinformed as to what ActiveX is. It's a plugin API, serving exactly the same purpose as the Netscape-derived plugin API that Firefox, Opera, and Chrome use. It's a way to run binary code in the browser window. Flash uses an ActiveX control, for example.

Now, the fact that there was a time when the default security on the plugin API was very poor (meaning any website could run any ActiveX that was installed, and many of them weren't properly secured) is undeniable, but come on, IE6 is almost 10 years old... MS will never fully live down its bad products, but that doesn't mean that they won't learn from them. These days, you have to specifically approve ActiveX controls, and installing one takes three different clicks - you don't do it by accident. Hell, I implement a basic but functional Flashblock on IE by simply setting the ActiveX control to not allowed on any page save those I specify, meaning it'll work on Pandora and YouTube, and basically nowhere else unless I decide to add permission for a specific site I visit.

Re:Does IE9 Support Web Standards or Dump ActiveX?

[hedwards]

You mean like a three way blink tag?

Re:Does IE9 Support Web Standards or Dump ActiveX?

[exomondo]

Do Windows box users still have to wait for IE to catch up with Web standards?

I don't know what idiotic platform you use, but on Windows - and many others - you don't have to use IE. So in answer to your question, No.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Did no-one tell microsoft?

[Hecatonchires]

The internet is being viewed on a lot of tablets, phones and netbooks that don't have the hardware support for this. It looks like their share is only going up. I'm sure some dev in a hurry is going to use this feature, but the moment they do they lock out all the new market.

Re:Did no-one tell microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where were your complaints when Chrome increased its JavaScript performance? After all, websites utilizing more-heavy JS would break the other browsers, yes?

Seriously, this is so dumb it hurts. Do you not understand what hardware acceleration is? Microsoft isn't adding new hardware-accelerated features; they are passively improving the existing implementation.

Re:Did no-one tell microsoft?

[cbhacking]

Actually, most tablets, phones, and netbooks have enough GPU to do a decent job of accelerating IE9. I tried it on my tablet - ultra-low voltage core 2 duo at 1.2 GHz, with Intel Integrated 3100 crap for graphics... it wasn't as good of framerates as on my gaming box, but I could certainly get decent performance (30-60 FPS) on the canvas tests. Considering that other browsers currently get around 4-12 in most cases, even on my gaming box, I think that's an acceptable showing for the graphics of a tablet.

Re:Did no-one tell microsoft?

[darjen]

Mobile devices will also start moving towards hardware accelerated browsers. I'm hoping it's sooner rather than later, as it will spell death for their precious walled gardens.

Re:Did no-one tell microsoft?

[ashridah]

The internet is being viewed on a lot of tablets, phones and netbooks that don't have the hardware support for this. It looks like their share is only going up. I'm sure some dev in a hurry is going to use this feature, but the moment they do they lock out all the new market.

Uh, Dude. They demoed this working at a convention a few months ago ON A NETBOOK. Popular consumer-grade netbooks have been out for >6 months that support all of this just fine. And, of course, the netbook that can't utilize accelerated graphics for IE9 ALSO cannot do it in flash or anything else with decent performance. Such a netbook is going to be slow no matter what you try to run (as people quickly found out with non-nvidia ion based netbooks.)

Re:Did no-one tell microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Same argument could be used to say "don't implement x feature because IE6 users can't utilize it and IE6 has major marketshare". That's sort of an anti-progress stance to take.

Re:Did no-one tell microsoft?

[Simetrical]

The internet is being viewed on a lot of tablets, phones and netbooks that don't have the hardware support for this.

And Internet Explorer market share is really high on tablets and phones, is it?

Re:Did no-one tell microsoft?

[exomondo]

The internet is being viewed on a lot of tablets, phones and netbooks that don't have the hardware support for this.

It's hardware accelerated support for canvas features, not IE-specific features. If this drives hardware accelerated support for these elements on other devices then so much the better for the end user experience.

Good ideas never die, they just rebrand

[Rogerborg]

Direct2D? DirectWrite? 15 years ago, we were calling that DirectDraw, and accelerated rasterisation was the hottest thing since sliced time. I guess what goes around comes around, and these kids today will be laughing at the new kids in another 15 years when they discover the wonders of DirectFlatOGram. Also, their Goddamn DirectNoise is too loud on my DirectLawn.

Re:Good ideas never die, they just rebrand

[Anonymous Coward]

So funny you wrote it twice, huh? Or did you just forget, gramps?

Re:Good ideas never die, they just rebrand

[forgot_my_nick]

If it gets the graphics card vendors to pay attention to the 2D API's again and improve support, then Hell, yes I'm all for it. Even on XOrg the graphics card vendors ignore the 2D graphics acceleration API's these days with the obsession with 3D. If you are lucky they will accelerate them indirectly through OpenGL. There is a reason why the open source XOrg drivers are generally faster at 2D graphics than the proprietary ones.

Re:Good ideas never die, they just rebrand

[Rastignac]

Remember WinG under Windows 3.1 ? That was DirectX v0.0.0 ! Very fast 2D graphics for games and apps, zooming, real-time dithering from true colors to 256 colors, etc. Some apps used WinG to be even better and faster (Paint Shop Pro, etc).
History is the same today !

Re:Good ideas never die, they just rebrand

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you never had a closer look at Direct2D (any maybe also not DirectDraw). There are quite significant differences in their design and what they can do.

Direct2D is a hardware accelerated scanline renderer, DirectDraw was not!

It's all slipping through their fingers

[BeforeCoffee]

Microsoft finally caved and built the canvas tag! ActiveX: Bonk with radioactive danger signs. Silverlight: Bonk. SVG? Meh, retained mode scenes with tags all over again. Souped up VML. I'm going to give that a Bonk too (even though it was hardware accelerated).

But canvas, now that's a pixel buffer: simple and beautiful! Now we are *talking*. DING DING DING!

Microsoft's building in canvas is a huge concession that they are losing mindshare to HTML5. And what they're doing is half right by building theirs faster and all micro-optimized and kernel-hooked as they love to do.

But this won't save them, they won't recapture the mojo. Well... that is, not until they backport these new HTML5 features to XP. Here's my take: adding features to an IE that is locked to Windows 7 does not make consumers want to buy Windows 7. Not when it is far simpler for the consumer to install a competing browser that runs on XP (and earlier.) I will go as far as to say that adding canvas to Windows 7's IE is really just advertising new features in the competition's browsers.

I love this canvas tag move by Microsoft, and its far overdue! But they're not back in the game until they stop all this nonsense and backport IE9 to XP (and, heck, Win2K while you're at it!) If your retort is "oh it costs too much to support, oh the API's have changed, oh you should upgrade your 9 year old turd of an OS!". C'mon. Cost? API's? We're talking about moneybags Microsoft here! They can do whatever they want; I have no pity for them when or if they fail due to another botched marketing plan and neither should you. And I will not upgrade my XP/Server 2003 until the reboots get faster on Windows 7. It takes my friend 5 minutes on cherry hardware to get a usable desktop after reboot, and his harddrive is always doing something in the background when nothing is going on! On my XP, the harddrive is quiet unless I am doing something with it, the CPU is idle unless I do something.

Upon further reflection over canvas ... Here's a thought Microsoft, maybe I can meet you half way. How's about backporting canvas to IE7/8 but with no hardware acceleration? This way you can sell the merits of a Windows 7+IE9 upgrade. See, I can be reasonable. :)

Re:It's all slipping through their fingers

[shutdown -p now]

But canvas, now that's a pixel buffer: simple and beautiful! Now we are *talking*. DING DING DING!

We'll get back to this discussion after you first run into an HTML5-enabled website that will use canvas for everything so as to not let you copy/paste or block ads...

Seriously, it's a great thing when used right, but the possibilities of abuse are so huge that I'm scared of what's coming on that front.

Re:It's all slipping through their fingers

[torgosan]

Great posting but as an aside: if your buddy's box is taking THAT long to boot to a "usable" desktop ["usable" may have different meaning to each of us], there is something wrong with his box. Seriously.

Re:It's all slipping through their fingers

[exomondo]

But they're not back in the game until they stop all this nonsense and backport IE9 to XP (and, heck, Win2K while you're at it!) If your retort is "oh it costs too much to support, oh the API's have changed, oh you should upgrade your 9 year old turd of an OS!". C'mon. Cost? API's? We're talking about moneybags Microsoft here! They can do whatever they want

No car analogy sorry, but while we're on the topic of backports where's my multi-tasking for the original iPhone? They should backport it to the 2G, i mean c'mon we're talking about the company with the biggest market cap in the industry, not to mention 20-something billion in cash reserves. Why won't they support and maintain my obsolete device at their expense?

The message this sends me

[erroneus]

Every time I hear "hardware accelerated" associated with the browser, I feel as though they have essentially given up trying to unbloat their browser and operating system so they are trying to make up for it by pushing off such tasks to the hardware.

I am down with hardware accelerated video and windows processing, especially years ago when processors were just too slow to do an effective job. But today we are working with multi-gigahertz multi-core processors on nearly every machine. It's truly a lot of processing power. Is it being wasted?

Other browsers get by just fine without hardware acceleration. Why does MSIE need it?

Re:The message this sends me

[shutdown -p now]

Every time I hear "hardware accelerated" associated with the browser, I feel as though they have essentially given up trying to unbloat their browser and operating system so they are trying to make up for it by pushing off such tasks to the hardware. ... Other browsers get by just fine without hardware acceleration.

So fine, indeed, that Safari has already added it, and Firefox, Chrome and Opera are all scrambling to implement it.

Seriously, have you even seen the demos? It's not about "needs acceleration to be as fast as other browsers" at all. It's about "5-10x faster than browsers without acceleration".

Re:The message this sends me

[ashridah]

Not to mention that your average video chipset can do the same job with much less power usage, since it's more heavily optimized for pipe-line based jobs. And since you can set things up in video memory, and then leave it there, you save on system resources, since you're using less of the system's bus to transfer rendered content.

And let's not forget what we can do with the cpu power since it's now freely available.

Pushing stuff off to the video card is just an overall win.

Re:The message this sends me

[Anonymous Coward]

http://linuxhippy.blogspot.com/2010/06/ie9-to-be-gpu-accalerated-firefox-20.html

Re:The message this sends me

[exomondo]

But today we are working with multi-gigahertz multi-core processors on nearly every machine. It's truly a lot of processing power. Is it being wasted?

Other browsers get by just fine without hardware acceleration. Why does MSIE need it?

Utilising the display hardware for rendering the display sounds like a pretty logical and effective use to me. I'd say it would be a waste not using the specific hardware for it's intended purpose.

Canvas is not to create all the page!

[Tei]

The ammount of wrong on the IE team is amazing. I am looking at the test, and I want to murder these dudes.

Canvas is not create to replace Flash, to create fullpages in canvas. This is a idiotic idea, and if some people run with it, we are trully fucked. Canvas is to enhance our hability to create webpages with things that nowdays are not possible. This is things like graphics of sales and useage dinamically written. Using canvas to create a page mutch like flash, adds nothing to the web, actually make it worse.

The IE team is the people with the worst ideas of the internet. Is a dangerous grupo of people, that seems activatelly tryiing to make the internet a bad location :-(

Re:Canvas is not to create all the page!

[Yvan256]

With or without those Microsoft demos, you know that lots of people will still go that route. You have the same choice as before with Flash-only so-called websites: try to navigate them to access the desired content or simply go elsewhere.

At least with hardware-accelerated canvas, it's going to be much faster than Flash on non-Windows systems.

Excuse me, make your browser work proper

[unity100]

before shoving in shiny crap. your ie8 causes SO many problems to web developers, webmasters and even their users that it isnt even funny to talk about it anymore.

ie8 still interprets a form tag as an element which should be block, regardless of whatever you try to do with it. it screws up a lot of designs which involve any complex form designs. the ONLY browser doing this is ie8. not even ie6.

do a good job about making a browser work before filling it shit.

Re:Excuse me, make your browser work proper

[ashridah]

So... have you tested that in the ie9 tech preview and filed a bug if it hasn't already been fixed, yet? or are you just uselessly shaking your fist from a basement?

oh good...

[Anonymous Coward]

plug your hardware directly into the internet, protected by a few layers of microsoft security? Sounds like a great idea to me!

I can see it now...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Microsoft today petitioned the US Government to bring Travis Ormandy up on charges for manslaughter, after he failed to wait 3 years before disclosing an IE9 vulnerability that can allow a malicious website to burn someone's house down by turning off his GPU fan."

No kidding

[Sycraft-fu]

HTML5 scares me, because I think it will lead to a farm more annoying web. For example I run Firefox because of Flashblock. I've not yet found anything like it in IE (the ones I have found work for crap). So why do I block Flash? Because I am an anti-flash zealot? No. Because it slows down browsing? No, my system is a heavy hitting quad core, it can spare lots of power for shiny effects. So why then?

Because Flash is used for the power of annoying. All over the damn web Flash it used for ads in an extremely annoying fashion. The ads that block everything out and move all over your damn page and so on. I don't want to see that shit. So, I block Flash, except on sites I want it on, and the web suddenly gets way less annoying.

HTML5 means that they'll be able to do all this shit, and even MORE annoying stuff, and I can't escape it. It'll be an inherent part of the web.

Not at all looking forward to that.

Re:No kidding

[WankersRevenge]

Don't let your panic run away with you. Yes ... HTML5 will offer a lot crazy crap that doesn't rely on a plugin to make it work. That doesn't you won't be able to prevent such things from rendering and using your system resources. Just as people made a plugin to strip flash from the dom, people can easily make another plugin to strip the canvas tag from the dom.

Re:No kidding

[shutdown -p now]

Just as people made a plugin to strip flash from the dom, people can easily make another plugin to strip the canvas tag from the dom.

This won't prevent content providers from using all-canvas websites just as they occasionally try to use all-Flash websites today. The difference is that it would be easier to justify canvas because "it's just HTML".

Re:No kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

GP's point was that everything will be in this new-fangled canvas. He cannot just remove it from the DOM without removing the very page he wishes to view.

This is a little different

[Sycraft-fu]

DirectDraw was just basic graphics acceleration. Mostly what DD offered was the ability to write things quickly to video memory, as one could do in DOS. It had support for blitting, calling page flips, and so on. More or less the kind of stuff you could do when you had low level access to everything in the system, but which you couldn't really do with a GUI in the way directly.

This all got deprecated by default with the advances in Direct3D and so on. You could just use a texture quad to do all that to the extent it was still needed. Most programs these days aren't concerned with quickly pushing a bunch of raw pixels to the screen.

Ok well Direct2D is a vector graphics API. It is to allow you to design 2D scenes that scale well to any size, and then its partner DirectWrite handles all the nice n' flashy font stuff. Part of the idea is to be able to easily do resolution independent user interfaces and such. DirectDraw wasn't for that at all, and the GDI isn't all that well suited for it. Direct2D is easy interfaces to allow you to draw custom, scalable, content. Could all be done with D3D probably, and you need a card with some 3D features backing it up to use, but that would be rather complex.

The basic hardware accelerated rasterization is something that has just been assumed for years which is why you don't hear about it. The GDI would make use of graphics cards to accelerate basic drawing. However the new features are all about doing more than just speeding up putting pixels on the screen. Rather you have the graphics card actually do some heavy lifting and composite the image together. THAT allows for cool new 2D features, like truly resolution independent stuff. You tell the GPU "I want a line from here to here," it takes care of all the details.

GPU virus

[bl8n8r]

This means the first virus to infect a GPU is not that far away.

Translationy

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't fuck anything other than your goddamned hand because you have a shrinking dick.

In case you can't be bothered

[donstenk]

it works really well on an old MacBook without dedicated 3D graphics (Intel something)

Does this sound like when M$ was gushing about...

[Anonymous Coward]

... .NET powering everything to anyone else? i.e. how it was going to save the world, walk the dog, make your breakfast, lunch, dinner and coffee, and go to work for you and life would be great?

(I'm still surprised that M$ managed to gain a foothold in the console world, but then they have enough cash to ride out losses for much longer than any other player and they went very conservatively w/the first XBOX(gimped PC), but it's about their only recent endeavor that seems to have gone anywhere outside of their mainstay Windows & Office products... They've been coasting on inertia for a long time now and, ufortunately, have the cash(and Windows/Office sales) for a long time yet to come...)

Why IE should just die - GIVE IT UP MICRO$OFT!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

IE will never be ubiquitous. MS will never spread it past its own OS offerings. Microsoft is loosing ground in its monopoly, and the field is growing wider all the time. People should just stop using IE so that the world can move on from proprietary to community. I think that every browser that supports multiple platforms should be supported. Let the best 4 win. We need options, but not IE.

Really people!!! Don't we want to use something that will work across all platforms?????

Re:just shows you how broken Windows is

[Shados]

There's nothing wrong with their graphic API. If you use DirectX or OpenGL to write the canvas element, it will be hardware accelerated. But like all mainstream operating systems, Windows has several graphic APIs. Some are hardware accelerated, and some are not. Thats not a thing specific to Windows. Get a grip.

Fringe market

[symbolset]

IE 9 doesn't work on 72% of the machines out there and it never will. It doesn't run on Windows XP. How standard does such a fringe browser have to be?

Re:Fringe market

[ashridah]

Right. Except that Windows 7 is selling 30 million units a month, and has already sold 150 million since it released. less than a year ago. IE9 is slated to be released in 2011. By then, XP won't have been purchasable for computers for almost a year, and will be on its way out both in market-share, and support.

And good riddance, it's 10 years old. Time to move on to newer stuff and get useful things done instead.

Selling?

[symbolset]

Microsoft is getting that many licenses, yes. So many people are trying to say that that means the thing is popular. Vista licensed 10 Million units a month in the face of a global recession. What does this mean? That license figures have nothing to do with adoption rates for Windows versions, nor for popularity of the software. It's just a measure of how effectively the company has cowed the industry that enterprises automatically get a license seat of their latest software under Software Assurance and most OEMs purchase a license for every machine shipped whether the machine will even run the software or not, or even if the end-user gets that license. It's a measure of the pent-up demand in a market that avoided purchasing hardware to avoid Vista and just can't wait any more. It's also not new money: Microsoft would pretty much get that money even if W7 was a blank disc.

Where is W7 adoption at really? 13.7%. That's doing pretty well but 1/3 of that was taken from Vista - the widely reviled product people can't get off of fast enough. As a whole Windows share is off by 2% in the past year. That's not a free-fall, but it's not a move in Microsoft's favor either.

The article is about IE9. IE9 will not install on Windows XP. Enterprises looking to migrate to IE9 services and applications cannot do so until they migrate to Windows 7. Application developers can't target the market for services that leverage IE9 technologies until the market moves to a platform that supports IE9. It's a catch-22. It's a real problem and you shouldn't pooh-pooh it.

On the other hand, other standards based browsers use the latest technologies and run on whatever platform you're running, so they make the better target for the application developer.

hahahah ahah basement haha.

[unity100]

stupid personal attack aside, what difference would it make if i was shaking my fist from a basement ? huh ? logic stops at the basement door ? i havent gotten that memo.


they keep screwing up, and they keep pushing out new versions of their shit over and over, with the hopes of not screwing this time. instead of doing a good job when they actually do something. and people have to pay for that shit. endless numbers of developers, webmasters, and even users are paying for their gross incompetence.

Embrace, extend

[Ilgaz]

People hate me for saying this but, MS JVM in first incarnations was perfect. Good performance, the stuff worked, it was well integrated to OS and was using OS features.

What happened to a point that Sun sued them and won? They "extended" it putting windows only features, completely breaking compatibility. I lived that nightmare just months ago when I naively tried to make a favor to a business by upgrading to Sun Java latest. Their intranet broke and we had to hunt for unsupported (by law!) MS JVM to install it to XP. Thank God some guys still keep it on their websites (including 3 trojaned versions we had to ignore).

That is just Sun Java. There are several other examples. MS is capable of supporting standards. They are also capable of influencing them to a point that, nothing will work except on Windows. That is the part people are afraid.

Re:just shows you how broken Windows is

[yyxx]

Which "mainstream operating systems" would that be? Neither on OS X, UNIX, or Linux do you have to do anything special in order to get hardware acceleration of 2D graphics if the hardware and drivers support it. I got my first hardware accelerated 2D graphics card for X11 more than 20 years ago and even back then, it just accelerated all apps through the existing APIs.

Re:just shows you how broken Windows is

[hellop2]

agreed

Re:Why IE should just die - GIVE IT UP MICRO$OFT!!

[exomondo]

Really people!!! Don't we want to use something that will work across all platforms?????

We can, how would MS' implementation of the canvas element in IE possibly stop you from using a cross-platform browser?

Webchumps like you are not programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

See subject line above webchump and quit fooling yourself that you actually understand anything about programming, because webchumps? Are far from being actual coders. The reason most of you end up doing that level of "work" (b.s.), is that you cannot cut it when it comes down to real programming in languages like C or C++. The amusing part is watching moronic little dolts like you act as if you know something about coding, when the reality is that most of you are nothing more than failed programmers trying to play one on tv and yet you had the nerve to call others stupid developers? You're the epitome of that phrase because of what you do.