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

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.

[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.

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?

[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: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

[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

[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.