Microsoft's IE9 to tap hardware for speed boost

[Night Hawk]

Microsoft'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.

More at: Microsoft's IE9 to tap hardware for speed boost

 

[thefabe]

Thamks N.H for doing all the research and posting of the articals. Fabe

 

[alwinwinjoe]

That's going to be a big leap for IE. Hoping it will be released soon enough...

 

[Night Hawk]

The beta release of IE 7 proceeded Vista as well as the IE 8 beta proceeding the 7 beta release back in Q4 2008. I wouldn't expect to see 9 until at least late 2010 if sooner then the testing on W8 early builds that will be likely in 2011 before any public availability for beta release to follow.

Back in the ME, 2K, followed by XP time frame IE 5.0 then 5.5 and soon after for XP IE 6 came close together and we all know how vulnerable IE 6 became to every bug so site tried to put on a system! If 9 goes fast then you might end up seeing an IE 10 ready and included in W8 when that comes out.

 

[Gornot]

I remember using IE8 on 32bit WinXP for the first time. I just loved the design and hated everything else. At the time of me using WinXP there were a lot of hacks involved, custom themes, cursors, fonts, and the first thing that made me give up on IE8 was that there was no text in the menus, due to WindowBlinds and the theme changes. Also, VobSub which is used for extracting subtitles from VOB files didn't work, this was a well-known issue.
And then, when I first installed Win7, I tried out IE8 again and loved it. I have been using it ever since, but lately I've noticed a few problems with handling Flash aplications and websites... But I am definitely looking forward to IE9 and, seeing as Microsoft is on a "winning spree" with Win7, MS Office 2010 and lots more, I have high hopes for this browser.

 

[Nburnes]

Hopefully IE9 can make a complete package. I have never really enjoyed IE, but I will definitely be trying it out this time around.

 

[Gornot]

The biggest problem about IE is that people keep dismissing it right away, without any interest in actually trying out the browser. I love it!
I used every major web browser since my first PC in 2004 and have to say that although IE really wasn't all that good before, IE8 was simply breathtaking.
People say to me: just use Firefox. And I did. And it looked impressive: custom themes, icons, add-ons, extensions etc. And then it crashed my system, I lost all my files and never used it again.

 

[Joshatdot]

If I can't use AdBlock Plus or summat fur IE, then it's FF.

 

[Qdos]

Internet Explorer supports plenty of Add-on modules, however they're not all free, so you'll possibly have to fork out some relatively small amount... that said I detest iE8 so much that I went to another browser and will not easily be tempted back...

 

[Night Hawk]

Actually the first impression of it's predacessor IE 7 was a let down here at first with the tabbed browsing opening everything in tab on onscreen while I always set things like the taskbar properties to never group or never combine in order to work with multiple windows individually.

The second best alternative to IE found is now the latest Opera 10 with Opera Unite. But IE 8 works here quite well as the primary browser and a wait for a look at the IE 9 beta will be interesting!

 

[JMH]

Similar article from a different source for those interested.

Microsoft isn't the only one developing a hardware-accelerated browser | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

 

[Night Hawk]

Why am I not surprized to hear that? We'll have to let the big guys have their own browser war! :roflmao:

That's a bit of reality in the free market place where one wants to be the first with something new!

 

[JMH]

Why am I not surprized to hear that? We'll have to let the big guys have their own browser war! :roflmao:

That's a bit of reality in the free market place where one wants to be the first with something new!

And when the elephants fight / make love let the ants beware.

 

[Nburnes]

I thought this was funny.

Not so fast, Internet Explorer! We know that you have great things in the works for IE 9 -- including Direct2D GPU acceleration, the 2D / vector graphics API that we first laid eyes on in Windows 7. And believe us, that got our attention -- as well as the attention of Mozilla programmer Bas Schouten. It seems that over the weekend, the young man successfully loaded Direct2D support into an alpha build of Firefox 3.7 -- just days after you announced its inclusion in the next version of your web browser. "Things are looking very promising for Direct2D" and Firefox, said Schouten, although "older PCs with pre-D3D10 graphics cards and WDDM 1.0 drivers will not show significant improvements." And we thought that accelerometer support was wild!

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