Wednesday, September 15, 2010

IE 9 Beta Strips Down For Speed

Microsoft says 'full hardware acceleration' will be implemented in IE 9."Those who have written off IE as being slow and old-looking are in for a surprise. The just-released Internet Explorer 9 beta is dramatically faster than its predecessor, sports an elegant, stripped-down interface and adds some useful new features, writes Preston Gralla. Even more surprising than the stripped-down interface is IE9 beta's speed. Internet Explorer has long been the slowest browser by a wide margin. IE9 has turned that around in dramatic fashion, using hardware acceleration and a new JavaScript engine it calls Chakra, which compiles scripts in the background and uses multiple processor cores. In this beta, my tests show it overtaking Firefox for speed, and putting up a respectable showing against Safari, Opera and Chrome. It's even integrated into Windows 7. One big problem: It will not work on Windows XP. So, forget the performance and security boost, many enterprises and netbook users."

via Slashdot Technology Story | IE 9 Beta Strips Down For Speed.



In March, Johnson explains, Microsoft released the first IE9 Platform Preview with GPU-powered HTML5 turned on by default, enabling hardware acceleration on "everything on every Web page" including text, images, backgrounds, borders, SVG (scalable vector graphics) content, and HTML5 video and audio. And with Platform Preview 3 in July, IE 9 introduced a hardware-accelerated HTML5 canvas.

Johnson claims that full hardware acceleration is achieved in three steps: Content Rendering (common HTML elements), Page Composition (image-intensive scenarios), and Desktop Composition (composition of final screen display). As a result, IE9 doesn't sacrifice performance for cross-platform compatibility. "When there is a desire to run across multiple platforms, developers introduce abstraction layers and inevitably make trade-offs, which ultimately impact performance and reduce the ability of a browser to achieve 'native' performance" (on the GPU) Johnson writes.

He also cites a demo Microsoft did running HTML5 video on a Netbook running IE9: Microsoft played two HD-encoded, 720p videos using "very little of the CPU" while "another browser maxed out the CPU while dropping frames playing only one of the videos," Johnson writes.

But others are quick to point out that it may not be that cut and dried. "Microsoft marketing is making noises about IE9 having a monopoly on 'full hardware acceleration.' They're wrong; Firefox 4 has all the three levels of acceleration they describe," according to a blog posted Sunday at MozillaZine, an independent Mozilla news, community, and advocacy site.

Intel, on the other hand, is addressing acceleration from the hardware side. The chipmaker released a video Friday showing IE9 running on a Core i5 processor, claiming that "Internet Explorer 9 is hardware accelerated on any piece of graphics hardware that supports DirectX 9." ...

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20016156-64.html#ixzz0zclzRPTd

2 comments:

Lindsey said...

If they ever make IE add-on-able like firefox-- and they come out with something like Firefox's Adblock Plus--- then, MAYBE I would give it another try.

Until then, I quite like never seeing banner ads or pop-ups, thanks.

Matthias Krells said...

Nice!were can i find the like-button or twitter-retweet-button :-) Matthias