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Microsoft's IE9 to tap hardware for speed boost
More at: Microsoft's IE9 to tap hardware for speed boostMicrosoft's IE9 to tap hardware for speed boost
Rivals, including Mozilla and Opera, also working to boost their browsers' rendering speeds
By Gregg Keizer
November 22, 2009 03:05 PM ET
Computerworld - Microsoft's next browser, Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), will offload image and text rendering chores to the PC's graphic processor, one way the company plans to increase the browser's overall performance, according to the firm's top IE manager.
But Microsoft won't be alone. Rivals including Mozilla, which makes Firefox, and Norwegian developer Opera, are working on ways to use a computer's graphics processor unit (GPU) to accelerate their browsers.
Microsoft last week revealed a few details about IE9, which has no set ship date or even a publicly-disclosed development plan. While acknowledging that the company had a lot of catching up to do, however, Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft's president of Windows and Windows Live, said that early work on IE9 had already shown significant performance strides.
In a follow-up interview, Dean Hachamovitch, the general manager for IE, explained one way that Microsoft would speed up IE9.