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IE9 Team Says "Our GPU Acceleration Is Better Than Yours"
An anonymous reader writes "Over on the IE blog Microsoft's Ted Johnson writes, 'With IE9, developers have a fully-hardware accelerated display pipeline that runs from their markup to the screen. Based on their blog posts, the hardware-accelerated implementations of other browsers generally accelerate one phase or the other, but not yet both. Delivering full hardware acceleration, on by default, is an architectural undertaking. When there is a desire to run across multiple platforms, developers introduce abstraction layers and inevitably make tradeoffs which ultimately impact performance and reduce the ability of a browser to achieve 'native' performance. Getting the full value of the GPU is extremely challenging and writing to intermediate layers and libraries instead of an operating system's native support makes it even harder. Windows' DirectX long legacy of powering of the most intensive 3D games has made DirectX the highest performance GPU-based rendering system available.' Some Mozillians hit back in the comments to the IE Blog post and others have written blog posts of their own. PC Mag's Michael Muchmore seems to conclude that IE9 and Firefox 4 are more or less the same (despite the title of his article) while Chrome currently lags behind."
IE 9 still can't pass Acid3.
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What good is having GPU acceleration that only works on one platform? The -entire- point of the trend of doing things in-browser is to make cross-platform compatibility a reality. If I wanted a game to work just on Windows, why wouldn't I just make an application that did that?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
So now IE 9 can make my GPU drivers crash. Instead of simply locking up and making me kill the process.
Free software web browser projects should reply by saying that they have better privacy, give away less personal / identifying information, help users avoid being mislead into clicking on ads, etc. etc.
I've never noticed whether my browser has fast, or slow, or any GPL acceleration.
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I find it ridiculous how browsers battle over something like this when they can't fix very old and stupid bugs, and fully support some older standards such as CSS 1 and CSS 2.
For example, Firefox crashes when a user loads a 2-3 MB GIF file, because each frame is kept decoded in memory and the browser goes over the 2 GB memory barrier (for 32 bit applications). https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=523950
Or, another example, the file input box ignores any css color rules simply because the html specs doesn't specify any rule so for several years nobody is able to decide something. It's actually since 2000 ffs: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52500
Or, for several years now, when uploading a file using a form, the progress is stuck somewhere around 50% and it's discussed over and over but nobody can actually do even a temporary simple fix. Since 2004: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=249338
It's actually surprising they're able to code something as complex as gpu acceleration when they can't fix small bugs and at the same time it's unfortunate that basic things are forever and ever skipped in the hunt to get the latest "features" (sometimes just to check something on a feature list) instead of actually getting some things working properly.
Actually, it doesn't. What you want is the probability that (not (everything is OK in all three browsers)) = 1 - 0.96^3 = 0.115264.
What I'm reading is "Our browser is so fat we have to tap the GPU to make it appear fast." Frankly, bloat is nothing to be proud of.
I've never gone to a website and cared about how fast it rendered. What I do care about is how secure I am and if the browser is able to deal all the pop ups, pop unders and other junk.
The IE dev team are just lacking any other decent USP to sell the merits of IE over other browsers. Firefox hasn't really made all that many big improvements for some time. So there's not much for IE to copy.
You're looking for This one. W7 and Vista have together less than 30%, and that's the only operating systems IE9 will run on. So if they get 100% of those, which seems unlikely, their max upside today is 30% of the total browser market. Since as you note they only get 60% share even though Windows is over 90%, it's a 20% upside potential for IE9 today - probably less since early adopters are also the people most likely to choose a different browser. Fringe. Not enough to dominate the developers.
XP has a very long tail. It's still selling in the market and will be installed through downgrade rights for the entire life of W7. XP will likely still be over 50% three years from now. IE9 doesn't run on XP.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I don't care about GPU acceleration. I just want it to support CSS like every other browser. Is that so fucking hard? It must be harder for a web browser to support web standards than it is to harness the power of a GPU.
Your post proves you have no idea about web development. Try and get an even moderately complex site to display the same in ie 6, 7 & 8; even ignoring all the other browsers you'll be sinking at least an extra 20% time/effort. Yet I can make something that works in firefox 1.x and it'll work exactly the same in chrome 7
pay you to build an app for my API, which is documented to 96% accuracy?
Please, please, give me a contract where the documentation is 96% accurate. That would be a dream. The typical state for most contracts is some wishy washy thoughts about what would be nice that then turn out to have been a hallucination one of the managers had the previous night after too much LSD.
The real war 5 years was against ActiveX and IE6.
The war now is, generally speaking against Flex, Silverlight, and some of the things Apple seems to want to do with Webkit that are much like IE back in the IE4/5 days.
That is, now that we don't have a monopoly we'd really like it to _stay_ that way.