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Google Confirms Chrome GPU Acceleration
An anonymous reader writes "Google is already experimenting with GPU acceleration in its latest Chrome developer builds. Chrome 7 can separate different layers of a webpage into CPU and GPU processes and combine those layers using the GPU as long as the browser is now launched with certain switches. Chromium 7 has also a new Labs feature that reveals that Google is thinking about moving tabs from the top of the browser to the left side. It seems that Chrome will be catching up with Firefox 4 and IE9 in terms of hardware acceleration soon."
These days most screens are wider than they are taller. And text still reads better vertically.
So the height is valuable real-estate while there is side space to waste.
My desktop has the application bars hide on the left/right.
The more vertical space the better.
TFS: "Google is thinking about moving tabs from the top of the browser top the left side"
Reveals that:
Google employs some people that think (ahead?)
Common people are stuck with the overcome (top the left side ???)
Alas.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I think it's fantastic that you can have your browser download executable code that can take advantage of local GPU acceleration.
That's progress
Another excuse to fill up pages with useless graphics.
Mobile devices will love this impetus.
So, now-- in theory --I can have Flash bugger my GPU instead of my CPU and system memory? ;) Fabulous!! It would be nice if Adobe would actually fix Flash, though. It's constantly hanging or crashing my browser, and at least once or twice a week, BSODing me. Bastard thing. :( Of course it doesn't help that every webpage EVERYWHERE uses Flash for damn near anything.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
well since chrome and android share the same 2d render engine i hope this means acclereated rendering for android, too.
Have been in there a long time, hidden by the --enable-vertical-tabs switch, so this isn't a new idea. Try it out yourself if you want (about:labs page isn't in yet so you'll need the switch).
If this is out before ie9 them microsoftboyz are gunna shit bricks... and multiple pairs of pants.
These features have been available in Dev Builds through a command line for a while... a tad slow, Slashdot.
Am I the only one who never realised that we'd stopped having hardware acceleration of web browsers like we did in the 1990s? Are they really rendering everything with software? No wonder they make a 3GHz quad-core feel like a 486.
Why don't they let people choose what side the tabs are on. Look at the windows taskbar, you could drag it to be on any side of your screen, why can't the tab bar thing work like that?
And yes, left hand tabs make a lot of sense. That, or can we go back to laptops with 3 by 4 screen ratios?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
It seems that Chrome will be catching up with Firefox 4 and IE9 in terms of hardware acceleration soon
I already find Chrome to be much faster then either firefox or IE.
I'm always baffled when people use a lot of tabs. What are the advantages of keeping all those pages open at the same time? If you have so many that you feel the need to organize them in a tree, why not just use the bookmarks from the menu, which are already organized that way?
Is this just Chrome's implementation of the ACCELERATED_COMPOSITING code path in the WebKit engine?
If so, this is nothing new. This has long been implemented in Safari and Mobile Safari (In fact, this is key to browsing performance on the iPhone).
There's also experimental support for this in QtWebKit's implementation: http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2010/05/17/qtwebkit-now-accelerates-css-animations-3d-transforms/
Just yesterday I had one crash so badly it didn't just take Chrome down, I nearly had to reset XP to escape. The program got stuck in some loop but commanded the whole screen in such a way that even the task manger wasn't visible.
Open a web page with linux firefox that has an embedded flash app which has to connect back to a server to load some streaming data but in an enviroment where the port for the stream is blocked by a firewall. Wait a few seconds then click the back button and watch firefox lock up solid. Works for all versions of firefox 3.x. Haven't tried 4 yet.
Of course, there is a Firefox extension that does exactly that.
...Emacs?
Hah! Take that!
Mastering the English language is fucking easy: all you have to do is to put an f* word in every fucking sentence.
If you want to speed up your browser, just block the following domains:
If you block the top 10 ad services, browsing speed improves substantially. Firefox BlockSite is useful for blocking, or you can edit HOSTS.TXT. This alone will make Slashdot pages load twice as fast. AdBlock isn't enough; it still loads the data, but doesn't display it. There's too much ad code out there which stalls page loading until the ad is served. So you get to wait for the ad servers. Sequentially.
Opera have allowed you to place tabs wherever you want since a long time. You can reorder/pin them and when on the sides, a dynamic thumbnail of the page is displayed.
Intelligence shared is intelligence squared.
I'm unsure if this dev release is out there for download, and I'm really not sure what would be the trusted site to get the (I hope) binary from. Can anyone help make this clear? Thanks :)
Back in the day we only needed powerful GPUs to play state of the art games. But it is really starting to look like you are also going to need it for browsing the world wide web.
A product like Warmouse will especially useful when the patent on half keyboards runs out.
Tabs on the left make sense, but unless you have a whole lot of them, tab images make better use of space. They are recognizable even when small, provide feedback, and make for a better click target. Also, for some sites, the text titles are just not useful for distinguishing tabs. (Actually, I would take out the text entirely, and only display it when one hovers over the tab bar--in the complete form next to, and over over the web page.)
Of course, a per window switch would be best, as there are definitely cases where you would want to use text tabs. (Lots of tabs from the same site, etc. )
Another nice presentation for image tabs would be an in-browser expose type interface. It could be implemented much like the Chrome downloads window; just another html page with the images/text, or in your own format entirely.
AdBlock isn't enough; it still loads the data, but doesn't display it.
But AdBlockPlus doesn't load the date (and so it does't have to "think about", how to not view it).
Google is putting Adobe to shame. The need for GPU acceleration is much greater with Flash and the difficulty should be similar, but Google's done the work and Adobe hasn't. To quote myself from earlier:
The penguin.swf blog is just an endless stream of excuses. Adobe absolutely can accelerate YUV->RGB. It's standard practice in software development to create a special fast path for a common scenario when performance matters. They can fall back to the slow path if the swf is trying to do something incompatible with the fast path.
Anyone writing a flash-based video player would opt for the fast path and follow whatever rules are necessary. But thanks to Adobe's laziness, that option isn't available. Flash is just a dinosaur that doesn't want to evolve.
FYI, here's how to accelerate video: Flash draws the scene in layers, back to front. For alpha blending or anti-aliasing of edges, it must read the RGB value below the layer currently being drawn to blend it with the current color. This is the problem, and there's a fairly simple solution. After rendering a YUV layer, render the layers above to an RGBA surface that starts out 100% transparent. Then send the output layers (RGB below video, YUV video, RGBA above video) to the video card for final compositing. The only scenario where this wouldn't work is if the player uses filters above the video. Have you ever seen a flash-based player that uses filters?
You control the tabs by pressing ctrl-tab.
Yes! I still love text-based interfaces too depending on the situation especially for speeds/quickness. I still use it for e-mails (Mutt and Pine), usenet/newsgroups (tin, nzbget, etc.), chat (e.g., BitchX -- wished it still get updates [not even a fork?] :(), console/SSH2, rz and sz (Zmodem, baby! forget sftp ;)), etc.
OK kids/younglings, get off my frakkin' lawn!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).