IE9 Team Says "Our GPU Acceleration Is Better Than Yours" 360
An anonymous reader writes "Over on the IE blog Microsoft's Ted Johnson writes, 'With IE9, developers have a fully-hardware accelerated display pipeline that runs from their markup to the screen. Based on their blog posts, the hardware-accelerated implementations of other browsers generally accelerate one phase or the other, but not yet both. Delivering full hardware acceleration, on by default, is an architectural undertaking. When there is a desire to run across multiple platforms, developers introduce abstraction layers and inevitably make tradeoffs which ultimately impact performance and reduce the ability of a browser to achieve 'native' performance. Getting the full value of the GPU is extremely challenging and writing to intermediate layers and libraries instead of an operating system's native support makes it even harder. Windows' DirectX long legacy of powering of the most intensive 3D games has made DirectX the highest performance GPU-based rendering system available.' Some Mozillians hit back in the comments to the IE Blog post and others have written blog posts of their own. PC Mag's Michael Muchmore seems to conclude that IE9 and Firefox 4 are more or less the same (despite the title of his article) while Chrome currently lags behind."
So? (Score:2, Insightful)
IE 9 still can't pass Acid3.
What good is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What good is... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is Microsoft we're talking about, they still believe they are the *only* platform.
Great (Score:2, Insightful)
How do we change the debate to important stuff? (Score:3, Insightful)
Free software web browser projects should reply by saying that they have better privacy, give away less personal / identifying information, help users avoid being mislead into clicking on ads, etc. etc.
I've never noticed whether my browser has fast, or slow, or any GPL acceleration.
Re:What good is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Pointless battles (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it ridiculous how browsers battle over something like this when they can't fix very old and stupid bugs, and fully support some older standards such as CSS 1 and CSS 2.
For example, Firefox crashes when a user loads a 2-3 MB GIF file, because each frame is kept decoded in memory and the browser goes over the 2 GB memory barrier (for 32 bit applications). https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=523950 [mozilla.org]
Or, another example, the file input box ignores any css color rules simply because the html specs doesn't specify any rule so for several years nobody is able to decide something. It's actually since 2000 ffs: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52500 [mozilla.org]
Or, for several years now, when uploading a file using a form, the progress is stuck somewhere around 50% and it's discussed over and over but nobody can actually do even a temporary simple fix. Since 2004: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=249338 [mozilla.org]
It's actually surprising they're able to code something as complex as gpu acceleration when they can't fix small bugs and at the same time it's unfortunate that basic things are forever and ever skipped in the hunt to get the latest "features" (sometimes just to check something on a feature list) instead of actually getting some things working properly.
Re:What good is... (Score:2, Insightful)
Same difference. Like Windows 2000 and XP. Or 3.0 and 3.1 ;-)
Re:Misleading. (Score:2, Insightful)
So (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:So? (Score:2, Insightful)
Firefox developers are never going to implement SVG fonts, because they think they are stupid (and they are right, in fact passing the Acid3 test is the only reason to implement SVG fonts these days). Implementing "HTML5" features is far more useful. But they welcome external contributions.
Re:So? (Score:2, Insightful)
They still have 60% of the market share because web developers keep it alive, throwing away standards and making sure IE users can see the best out of their apps/websites.
I never saw a website forcing the usage of Firefox/Chrome/Safari/Anything better than IE, but I can't count the number of time I had to fake the usage of IE to bypass a block from a website forcing IE for no apparent reason.
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
What, 97% ACID3 compliance ain't good enough for you?
100% ACID3 compliance doesn't mean it's fully standards compliant. Chrome is 100% compliant but one check at quirksmode.org and you'll see that it doesn't support some CSS 3 features properly, like 'content', while Firefox supports those same features properly.
Seeing that Chrome still doesn't support basic features like saving tab state after a restart - features that Firefox has had for a long time - I'd say the Firefox team is doing a hell good of a job. Your "needs to swallow its pride" statement is uncalled for.
I don't care (Score:3, Insightful)
I've never gone to a website and cared about how fast it rendered. What I do care about is how secure I am and if the browser is able to deal all the pop ups, pop unders and other junk.
The IE dev team are just lacking any other decent USP to sell the merits of IE over other browsers. Firefox hasn't really made all that many big improvements for some time. So there's not much for IE to copy.
Re:Pointless battles (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong chart (Score:3, Insightful)
You're looking for This one [netmarketshare.com]. W7 and Vista have together less than 30%, and that's the only operating systems IE9 will run on. So if they get 100% of those, which seems unlikely, their max upside today is 30% of the total browser market. Since as you note they only get 60% share even though Windows is over 90%, it's a 20% upside potential for IE9 today - probably less since early adopters are also the people most likely to choose a different browser. Fringe. Not enough to dominate the developers.
XP has a very long tail. It's still selling in the market and will be installed through downgrade rights for the entire life of W7. XP will likely still be over 50% three years from now. IE9 doesn't run on XP.
Re:So? (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, it's because there's a "speed limit" that the extra performance matters most.
Graphics acceleration for animation etc. is all about getting stuff rendered within the time a frame takes to complete. If you miss that time, graphics stutter, tear, or just plain look boring.
Now remember that acceleration of a line or a video means you have more time to do other things. Just like how acceleration of 3d texturing meant more time to add extra layers of texture and thus achieve more realism.
Re:Pointless battles (Score:3, Insightful)
It would also be faster if you go to Options and disable loading of images and Javascript. Why don't you go and do that?
By the time Firefox will make GPU acceleration work right, which is probably 1-2 years, two video card generations will come and go and the technology will be already obsolete. We'll then have 12-16 core processors capable of working with video as fast as they plan to make video work with GPU now.
You can see that with DXVA, implemented in Windows 2000 first, which is already not supported in Windows Vista. Video players to this day have problems using either DXVA 1.0 or DXVA 2.0 and drivers don't fully support these two yet.
Oh, and should I mention that 30-50% of the computers around have Intel integrated graphics which suck at GPU acceleration? The most recent integrated video card is barely able to accelerate videos.
So, websites would also have to have a fallback mechanism so they'll most likely resort to CPU + Canvas + some Direct2D or OpenGL and we'll still have Flash or CPU rendering on canvas in 2015.
How about... (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't care about GPU acceleration. I just want it to support CSS like every other browser. Is that so fucking hard? It must be harder for a web browser to support web standards than it is to harness the power of a GPU.
Re:staaaaaandards? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What good is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, nobody ever browses the web on anything other than Microsoft Windows.
There is no such thing as an iPhone. Where did you get the idea that "iPhones" existed? There is no such thing. There is only Microsoft Windows.
And "Android" means someone like that robot guy in Star Trek. It is not the name of a popular operating system that millions of people use to read websites. It is just a kind of robot.
Also: nobody in the entire world owns a Mac, unless you are talking about Big Macs, in which case many people own them but only very briefly. And I am definitely not typing this comment on a Linux box, because Linux is not ready for the desktop, so it is quite impossible that I might be using anything other than Microsoft Windows, which is the only relevant platform in the world.
Mmm, this kool-aid is tasty. Must drink more.
Re:Misleading. (Score:4, Insightful)
pay you to build an app for my API, which is documented to 96% accuracy?
Please, please, give me a contract where the documentation is 96% accurate. That would be a dream. The typical state for most contracts is some wishy washy thoughts about what would be nice that then turn out to have been a hallucination one of the managers had the previous night after too much LSD.
Re:Pointless battles (Score:1, Insightful)
You're assuming that the developers who implemented the hardware acceleration support were doing so instead of fixing those bugs, which is a big and likely incorrect assumption.
Agreed.
It's a tired straw man argument.
Unfortunately, that's not what a strawman argument is.
Re:So? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Who cares if most people use IE9 (Score:3, Insightful)
The real war 5 years was against ActiveX and IE6.
The war now is, generally speaking against Flex, Silverlight, and some of the things Apple seems to want to do with Webkit that are much like IE back in the IE4/5 days.
That is, now that we don't have a monopoly we'd really like it to _stay_ that way.
Re:Pointless battles (Score:1, Insightful)
For most products, the popular opinion is that product defects are the vendor's problem. But with some people, where Firefox is concerned, product defects are your problem.
This is why people get turned off by OSS projects. Even though most of the Mozilla people themselves aren't dickbags, some of their "advocates" drive people toward products made by people where you will not get the "fix it yourself" attitude.
I agree that big GIFs is kind of a corner case, and one I basically never encounter. But it's NOT okay to imply that a problem isn't a problem because it's Open Source so you could just do it yourself. That just makes Open Source look bad, as though it's an excuse for poor product behaviour.