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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.
You know, I keep hearing this, how Flash keeps crashing browsers. I use quite a few Flash sites ranging from casual games to management applications for security appliances, and I think I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times I've had a Flash related browser issue over the last couple of years.
I think it's either a tired meme or some people just don't know how to setup and maintain a stable system.
Nah, just keeping the tradition of taking stuff from Opera; life as usual. ;)
One that hath name thou can not otter
The problem is that in order to keep Flash from crashing you pretty much need to run flashblock or noscript which cripples your browsing experience and unfortunately there are sites out there that actually try to obfuscate their javascript and Flash content to trick you into loading their annoying ads.
Basically it's a pain in the ass to keep Flash from hogging resources so most users just don't do it even if they know how to.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
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?
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.
Today's GPUs are FAST and their power is wasted if not used. What's the harm in harnessing it ? It's not mandatory, browsers will use GPUs if they can, else they will fallback to the CPU. OTOH if you complain about the state of the web in that it requires GPU power to actually provide a faster experience, well partially I feel the same, but then again imagine being able to to all kinds of fancy content without writing one line of C/C++ code. Enabling more people to create. This is going to be awesome!
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.