IE9 Throws Down the Hardware Acceleration Gauntlet

An anonymous reader writes "Over on Microsoft's IE blog they have an interesting comparison of browsers with regard to hardware accelerated page rendering. They write, 'One of our objectives with Internet Explorer 9 is taking full advantage of modern PC hardware to make the browser faster. We're excited about hardware acceleration because it fundamentally improves the performance of websites. The websites that you use every day become faster and more responsive, and developers can create new classes of web applications through standards based markup that were previously not possible. In this post, we take a closer look at how hardware acceleration improves the performance of the Flying Images sample on the IE9 test drive site. When you run Flying Images across different browsers you'll see that Internet Explorer 9 can handle hundreds of images at full speed while other browsers, including Internet Explorer 8, quickly come to a crawl.' Absent from the comparison is a nightly build of Firefox with Mozilla's forthcoming Direct2D acceleration enabled."

Re:Who understands "throws down Gauntlet"?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Why do people keep using idioms which don't mean anything in the modern language any more?

By definition, no idiom's meaning is apparent in modern language. Unless you don't know what a gauntlet is, this idiom is no different than any other. They are used because they are colorful and make our language more interesting.

Re:Why bother ...

[leuk_he]

YOu just need a little bit of imagination.

-Playing Quake ET written in javascript in a browser at playable framerates.
-Those VR implementation (think google streetview 360) are finally working without plugins.
-Online games.
-Everything in a browser. (silly but it happens).

Forget those 1.0 websites with a little bit op powerpoint animation.

And best of all: you need a good graphics card to do your work. wink wink.

Re:I feel sad.

[sznupi]

You can still encounter such speeds often, when using mobile access (3G not everywhere, overloaded network, EDGE not attaining it's max speed too, and so on)

Yeah, it's a bit frustrating...though, luckily, there are ways to make it much more smooth; such as Opera Turbo with disabled plugins.

Re:What'll you bet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Never mind all the rendering that HTML5 does.

Ok. And how much marketshare does HTML5 have? How much support?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines_(HTML_5) [wikipedia.org]

I still see a lot of "NO" in those comparison tables. Until HTML5 can be supported, have similar look and feel, across close to 90% of the market, people won't design for it. Flash has almost 99% market penetration, it is by far the most consistent experience for a user. I don't want to go back to the days when a site was "designed for IE4" and looked horrible on different browsers.

Flash isn't as annoying as it once was. People have become a little better at using it in moderation.

flying images on mac

[sandhitsu]

On my macbook pro, Safaris is the winner! 60 fps consistently. Firefox reached 45 fps. Sadly, Chrome is is my default browser now could only go upto 6 fps!
Who cares about IE9 anyway ?

Re:Hey everyone, this is Microsoft!

[jim_v2000]

>reducing the amount of computation we do in IE

Apparently that's not working so hot for the other browsers in this case: "When you run Flying Images across different browsers you'll see that Internet Explorer 9 can handle hundreds of images at full speed while other browsers, including Internet Explorer 8, quickly come to a crawl."

Re:I feel sad.

[wisnoskij]

As someone with experience, a few years ago.

I would say excessive use of ad-blocker, blocking all unnecessary pictures/multimedia, really helps.
When a page is reduced to just its text, it might not look as good but it sure loads faster.

Re:I feel sad.

[maxume]

There are preferences to turn on the old version.

Re:Hey everyone, this is Microsoft!

[GigaplexNZ]

Did you even pay attention to what you replied to? Using the GPU is looking for more processing power, and not reducing the amount of computation done. I'm not saying they can't be more efficient and take advantage of GPU acceleration at the same time, but your attempt to correct the OP was misplaced.

Re:Thank God!

[Real1tyCzech]

"BTW Microsoft, if hardware acceleration is so important why is the GDI not hardware accelerated in Vista and only partially accelerated in Windows 7 (about nine functions) even though it was fully accelerated in XP? Can we get some consistency here?" How about no? ...and for good reason. GDI is supposed to use CPU, not GPU...for systems that do not have the GPU horsepower to accelerate *everything*. WPF/Aero is GPU, not CPU...for systems with the GPU horsepower to spare. Frankly, I'm amazed they accelerated *any* of GDI. I was under the hopeful illusion they were depreciating GDI entirely...

Re:why flamebait

[poetmatt]

well that's a lot of interpretation off of a phrase that I never said.

Hardware acceleration is also not new to browsers at all. I welcome competition, but changing things from cpu reliance on acceleration to graphics card is really just trying to make things sound interesting, and it's barely even a niche.

a: it only works in windows, due to the proprietary nature.
b: it only works on computers with actual graphics cards and not embedded hardware.
c: it only works in IE9, and specifically with SVG, if I recall correctly.

Combine all that and you have a small amount of even the windows market that would take advantage of this. Make this real world scenarios and you have another even smaller amount of people who would ever see a use.

Meanwhile, how is this significantly different than any of IE's competition in the browser market? I fail to see how you think this equates to actual performance changes or anything. Methinks if you read the article carefully you'll see how there actually isn't a performance increase resultant from what they're doing.

All they did is said "firefox gets 64FPS, and we get 60, but you have to divide their scores by 4". So they claim firefox gets 16.4 FPS, while stating that IE gets 60FPS. Nice spin, isn't it.

Re:Hey everyone, this is Microsoft!

[poetmatt]

your post seems disgenuous. You're trying to imply every os has continual bloat, but all versions of vista, including windows 7, will never be usable on 256MB. You'll be lucky if you can get it run a single application. Ubuntu is and always has been usable with 256MB of ram. OSX is not currently usable with 256MB of ram.

point: you're fibbing your numbers here.

Re:Hey everyone, this is Microsoft!

[gandhi_2]

If you don't have hyperthreading, this page [washk12.org] can go to 100%.

Firefox 3.6 on linux works like a dream with demo

[Viol8]

Their flying images demo just kept on rolling when I tried it with firefox 3.6 on my slackware linux box. I jacked the number of images up as high as it would go and it was still doing something like 50fps. So looks like firefox got their first.

Re:Hey everyone, this is Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

I certainly can't speak for the Firefox devs, but I know if I was going to do some accelerated drawing on Windows I wouldn't target OpenGL either right now. I understand the reasons why it is better to have a standard like OpenGL and use it - and in a perfect world I would choose it over DirectX. However, the situation today is that OpenGL drivers on Windows don't really work well. This is mostly a "catch-22" - not many people use them so the ATIs and nVidias of the world put very little work and effort into them. As a central desktop design person at a company with 90,000 machines I can tell you that when we do get apps in that use OpenGL we often have to open bugs with ATI or nVidia to try to get a driver that actually works. when we get a DirectX app, it just works. Again - not by choice, but that is the reality today on Windows. If I was part of the Firefox team I'd be targeting DirectX too because I wouldn't want to handle all the support issues of doing it with OpenGL. Again, not OpenGL's fault - it is clearly a failing of the video card manufacturers level of interest / support combined with Microsoft trying to kill off OpenGL (yes, they backed off from it, but folks still remember how they were going to disable it in Vista).

Re:Hey everyone, this is Microsoft!

[theaveng]

all versions of vista, including windows 7, will never be usable on 256MB.

Oh really?

- Win7 on 256 MB - http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=windows+7+on+256+MB [youtube.com]
- Win7 on 128 MB - http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=windows+7+on+128MB [youtube.com]

I agree it runs like crap on 128, about like using XP on 128MB, but WIN7 works fine on 256. Half the memory is used for the OS, and the other half is available for apps.

Re:why flamebait

[aztracker1]

Honestly, I'm not nearly as concerned about proprietary solutions, as long as they work, and/or there are open-source alternatives that do near as well or better. Opera seems to be doing a pretty good job at implementing HTML5, CSS3 and ES5 as it stands, and they aren't open-source either. I'm pretty happy that it appears MS is moving away from it's COM based rendering and scripting environment that are separated from each-other as much as they were (which affected garbage collection on event attached items). I've come across a couple of bugs in IE8, one that's particularly annoying (extend array and/or object or function, then pass a helper method to JSON.parse and watch an exception you can't f-ing catch blow up on you, at least the rendering is much more consistent with other browsers.

It's still far better than the browsers in the 1997-2002 timeframe, I got so sick of DHTML hackery between NN and IE that I pretty much avoided any client-side coding from 2001 to early 2003. I'm eagerly awaiting the day that IE6 finally dies at the company I'm working at. Our apps are being tested for IE8 compatability (as well as FF3.6), so that maybe in the next year, they can mass-migrate everyone and pull the plug on IE6 (finally). Too many internal sites/apps out there are/were targeting the broken rendering in IE6.

Re:Firefox 3.6 on linux works like a dream with de

[Solandri]

The point of their test isn't achieving high FPS. It's achieving high FPS with low CPU utilization. My crummy laptop gets about 40 FPS with Firefox 3.6.3, but the CPU meter is pegged at 50% (one core fully utilized).