Filed under: Microsoft, Browsers
In a blog post -- nay, a call to arms! -- published just moments ago, Microsoft's IE9 team has lowered and braced its hardware acceleration joust and begun its thundering charge towards September 15th: the date of the beta.
The entire post seems dedicated to hardware acceleration, however. Does IE9 have another weapon up its sleeve, or is this it? Perhaps we'll see a series of blog posts over the next few days detailing IE9's secret weapons -- but somehow I doubt it. The developer previews haven't produced any new and exciting technologies, but maybe Microsoft has saved something for the IE9 beta launch next Tuesday.
Internet Explorer 9's secret juice, incidentally, is a rendering pipeline that is hardware accelerated from end to end -- from the downloading of images and video into the graphics card's memory, through to the final composition made by the Desktop Window Manager in the IE9 window. To do this, IE9 leverages both Direct2D and DirectWrite for content rendering, and Direct3D for the actual composition. The blog post has a very nice diagram that details the process, if you're interested.
Microsoft claims that IE9 is the only browser that is fully hardware accelerated -- and while I can confirm that it has the edge on Firefox, I think Chrome might be a lot closer than Microsoft thinks. Of course, Chrome can't win: in a rather thinly-veiled attack, the post also points out that 'other browsers', with their mix of different subsystems and abstraction layers, won't be as fast or stable as IE9.
I'm bored of all this hardware acceleration talk! Where's the user interface? Will IE9 have add-ons, or an app store? Hardware acceleration is great and all, but first and foremost a browser has to be usable.Microsoft on IE9: our hardware acceleration is better than yours originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 10 Sep 2010 14:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | Email this | Comments
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