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IE9 Team Says "Our GPU Acceleration Is Better Than Yours"

Posted by timothy on from the them's-renderin'-words dept.

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."

6 of 360 comments (clear)

  1. What good is... by Darkness404 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:What good is... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yeah, nobody ever browses the web on anything other than Microsoft Windows.

      There is no such thing as an iPhone. Where did you get the idea that "iPhones" existed? There is no such thing. There is only Microsoft Windows.

      And "Android" means someone like that robot guy in Star Trek. It is not the name of a popular operating system that millions of people use to read websites. It is just a kind of robot.

      Also: nobody in the entire world owns a Mac, unless you are talking about Big Macs, in which case many people own them but only very briefly. And I am definitely not typing this comment on a Linux box, because Linux is not ready for the desktop, so it is quite impossible that I might be using anything other than Microsoft Windows, which is the only relevant platform in the world.

      Mmm, this kool-aid is tasty. Must drink more.

  2. Pointless battles by mariushm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Pointless battles by RebelWebmaster · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You're assuming that the developers who implemented the hardware acceleration support were doing so instead of fixing those bugs, which is a big and likely incorrect assumption. It's a tired straw man argument.

  3. Re:So? by arose · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Ignorance at it's finest. Acid3 is not a standard, it doesn't measure standard compliance. Implementing just enough to pass Opera/Webkit style is absurd, go bark up their tree.

    --
    Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
  4. Re:So? by FooBarWidget · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What, 97% ACID3 compliance ain't good enough for you?

    100% ACID3 compliance doesn't mean it's fully standards compliant. Chrome is 100% compliant but one check at quirksmode.org and you'll see that it doesn't support some CSS 3 features properly, like 'content', while Firefox supports those same features properly.

    Seeing that Chrome still doesn't support basic features like saving tab state after a restart - features that Firefox has had for a long time - I'd say the Firefox team is doing a hell good of a job. Your "needs to swallow its pride" statement is uncalled for.