There’s very little we know about Internet Explorer 9 but certainly
one the most interesting bits that is already publicly available is that
it will support hardware graphics acceleration. And here come those bad
guys from Mozilla Foundation to steal the limelight again.
Internet Explorer 9 will undoubtedly have other surprises in store
for us, if we live long enough to see its release (it will probably be
out in 2011). Nonetheless, getting beaten at its own game again surely
hurts.
Of course we saw that coming at the moment Microsoft published the
Windows 7 Direct2D API but it’s happening even sooner than we expected.
Apparently Bas Schouten and his team already have at their hands a
Firefox browser that can render everything using Direct2D, making
intensive usage of the GPU (including the browser UI elements
themselves). And the load times it shows on some websites, compared to
the regular version are impressively different. You can check them out
after the break.
So if you have a half decent GPU at hand you might save yourselves
quite some time when browsing simply structured websites. On complex
ones with more text than images for example the GPU-accelerated
rendering shows pretty small-to-none advantage over the conventional
CPU-powered rendering. Still the results are pretty encouraging and
indicate that the sooner GPU-assisted rendering makes its way to the
desktop browsing, the better.
Some time will pass before we actually get that browser to our
computers, but with the developers already having a working version, the
first beta can’t be that far away.
Thursday, 11 September 2014
