IE9 Throws Down the Hardware Acceleration Gauntlet 601
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."
Hey everyone, this is Microsoft! (Score:2, Insightful)
Instead of reducing the amount of computation we do in IE to make it faster, let's just look for more processing power instead!
Re:Hey everyone, this is Microsoft! (Score:4, Insightful)
not only that, but it's also proprietary, aka directX. So they're paving the way for, well, nothing.
why flamebait (Score:3, Interesting)
i would like to call the idiot who modded the above flamebait to come and fix the tag block level interpretation issue in ie8. their rendering engine is screwing up, and since it is proprietary, it cant be fixed by community. so we have to wait microsoft to get its ass up and fix their incompetence themselves in some far away point in future.
adding a proprietary directx to the mix will just increase these kind of hellholes, due to adding another dimension to watch out for. and since its proprietary, someon
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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you must be crazy or something. You really think people need to be re-explained why relying on proprietary software is bad, especially when it comes to DirectX? I thought it was a given that people were smart enough to understand that proprietary = bad.
Why don't you take a look at how many other platforms support DirectX?
See, now I have to provide reasoning for things that are blatantly obvious, just because of your asinine comment.
Re:why flamebait (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't have to make a case for why proprietary could be bad.
You do need to make a case for why in a given case you think "better than the competition, but proprietary" is inferior to "inferior, but free", since it's blatantly obvious that it isn't true in all cases.
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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
Um, no. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure he was equating "hardware-accelerated" with "better than the competition" and "purely software-rendered" with "inferior."
Disclaimer before I get flamed for being a Microsoft shill: Hardware acceleration still isn't enough for me to switch from Firefox to IE. YMMV.
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I would say you are very very young, and blinded by your faith in open source. 90% of the arguments you gave are true of open source as well.
because it is utterly, strategically foolish to build on a framework that is programmed by 5 ever-changing group of developers from the internet that can change its priorities at any given point :
- noone fixes any issues with the framework but 1-2 of the core group
- priorities of the core group matter. if the core group thinks issues with that product/framework are lo
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microsoft will give you binary compatibility for a decade ?
you mean they 'gave' you backwards compatibility. not any more. and probably they wont give it out any more either.
moreover, if your issue is more or less a common one, (and sometimes even if its an uncommon one) someone in an open source community will issue a mod/patch for it to make it backwards compatible.
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Even Office XP which ran on Windows 98 runs under Windows 7.
Re:why flamebait (Score:5, Insightful)
Your reasoning is based on one quasi-statistic "Look at how many other platforms support DirectX."
How about a more relevant statistic: Look at the installed base of directX compared to other technologies on other platforms. Also, consider driver stability and hardware support from vendors.
You lose.
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Re:Hey everyone, this is Microsoft! (Score:5, Insightful)
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I wonder if it will work with OpenGL on other platforms...
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let's just look for more processing power instead!
To be fair:
- Microsoft did take time to optimize Windows Vista 6.1 (win7) so it can run on as little as 256 megabytes, where it previously needed 1024. It sounds like MS is making similar optimizations for Internet Explorer so it runs better and faster.
- MS is not the only one with bloat. OS X used to run on only 128 (per system requirements) and now it requires 1 gigabyte. Ubuntu Linux used to run on my 96 MB laptop, and now the latest 2009.10 version won't boot at all. Even on my 512MB desktop it
Re:Hey everyone, this is Microsoft! (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Let them try to get this one fixed, we'll laugh when they hit a wall. If not, we'll find ways to compete and get this battle back on par to get a better experience.
I've seen some graphs comparing the rendering of a page using parallell processing and it's been a nice showoff, making the standoff between browsers a bit more spicy and tense again. Lets improve the webexperience, I nee
Re:Hey everyone, this is Microsoft! (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of reducing the amount of computation we do in IE to make it faster, let's just look for more processing power instead!
Did you look at the CPU graphs at the end of the article? If you look at the graphs for IE8 [winisp.net] and IE9 [winisp.net], it shows the CPU usage has been greatly reduced by offloading the tasks to the GPU. It went from 50% CPU usage to an average of 12%.
This is just a better use of the processing power available in the modern computer.
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Why in gods name should a web browser be using 50% of your CPU in the first place?
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If you don't have hyperthreading, this page [washk12.org] can go to 100%.
Re:Hey everyone, this is Microsoft! (Score:5, Interesting)
Because of the complexity of pages now. If you want to stay with no-image, no-javascript, no-flash html, there are fantastic browsers out there that will support your every need. But if you want to do crazy things with your browser like: Ball Pool [mrdoob.com], then it's going to make that poor browser nom your clock cycles like a morbidly obese person at a buffet.
Re:Hey everyone, this is Microsoft! (Score:5, Informative)
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:Hey everyone, this is Microsoft! (Score:5, Insightful)
Finally, someone is doing this right. I don't know how many times I've wished for hundreds of flying images obscuring the web page content. I was getting bored of just one or two constantly distracting me every time I scrolled or did anything, since they didn't always make me leave the page in disgust. But hundreds, shit yeah. I feel like the time I got one of those five-blade razors. This is one big step to the day they finally bring the Web up to television standards, so that I can confidently avoid it just like I've avoided TV for the last decade. Here's to progress.
Re:Hey everyone, this is Microsoft! (Score:4, Interesting)
That is of course if Mozilla does the same thing too.
But really who cares... What people want is a fast browser. IE is now one of the older browsers out there, it has a lot of stuff that cannot be removed, a lot of backwards compatibility that other browsers just don't care about. IE is still used heavily in a lot on intranet based applications and you just can't really do a full clean house. But if IE 9 takes a lot of the overhead and has the hardware do some more of the work and things work faster it is just better for all of us... Still any web application needs to be tested to make sure it works with IE, and this will be the case for a long time. If IE runs too slow it stops us developers from putting new features and options that may take the load off the server, just because IE runs too slow. I remember back in the IE6 I had a search screen that I needed to redo because in Firefox the page loaded in 0.5 seconds (1 second on the iPhone Safari) and IE loaded it in 5 minutes... Taking way too long to process.
So if IE can render faster all the better that means I can balance the work the server and client does, more efficiently.
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IE is still used heavily in a lot on intranet based applications and you just can't really do a full clean house.
And it's exactly those "intranet based applications" that won't see much (if any) of a boost from offloading rendering from the CPU to the GPU - when's the last time you saw a corporate desktop with anything other than an entry-level, integrated graphics chip?
I feel sad. (Score:5, Insightful)
I feel sad about it when hardware acceleration is needed for rendering, what, websites.
We live in interesting times indeed. I want my Web back.
Re:I feel sad. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Massive adds? So that's why the processor is getting used up!
Re:I feel sad. (Score:4, Insightful)
I concur with your opinion that websites need to be made smaller for those with slow connections (dialup, cellphone) or slow computers. HOWEVER I got into an interesting debate with a libertarian who said all websites should include flash or otherwise be video-oriented.
I commented that's not fair to, for example, my friend's father who is stuck with dialup with no other options, and flash/videos should not autoload until the user gives permission (i.e. click "play"). The libertarian commented, "Let him buy satellite then. Yeah it's expensive, but why should *I* have to have a boring web experience due to his cheapness?" - Next I said flash-heavy websites like virginmobileusa.com could simply offer low-bandwidth, non-flash versions for those with dailup. He commented, "If people can't get to Virgin's website, too bad. Dialup users probably can't afford a cellphone anyway."
Needless to say I was flabbergasted. Slashdot offers a low bandwidth version. What's so damn troublesome about offering the same on other sites? Mr. Libertarian would not be denied his video jollies, while my friend's father could choose the non-video versions for his slow 50k connection. His whole attitude seemed cold and uncaring.
Anyway not everyone agrees with our opinion that websites should be optimized.
Some think the web needs to be bigger with high-def gigabyte videos or flash.
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Re:I feel sad. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't see how anyone with a dial-up connection could do even casual browsing anymore...most websites nowadays push the 750k-1MB size, if not even bigger. (my own website linked in my sig is even guilty of this, despite my best efforts to keep things minimalistic)
Re:I feel sad. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Given the complexity of modern websites, I see it as a necessary evil. We can't stop bad, bloated websites any more than we can stop the ocean tides.
Re:I feel sad. (Score:5, Insightful)
Start with Slashdot. Of all the sites I visit (not all that many really, only about 30 or 40) Slashdot is the one that makes me wish I had a faster CPU. Clicking into an article with lots of contents on Slashdot will sometimes lock my browser entirely for many seconds, sometimes up to 30 seconds or so.
I'd be a lot happier with the old pre-AJAX version.
Re:I feel sad. (Score:4, Insightful)
Start with Slashdot. Of all the sites I visit (not all that many really, only about 30 or 40) Slashdot is the one that makes me wish I had a faster CPU. Clicking into an article with lots of contents on Slashdot will sometimes lock my browser entirely for many seconds, sometimes up to 30 seconds or so.
I'd be a lot happier with the old pre-AJAX version.
Fully quoted so I can agree strongly. Only a few add laden websites choke my system more than slashdot!
Re:I feel sad. (Score:5, Informative)
There are preferences to turn on the old version.
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I find it sad that there are people in the world that consider web pages to still be static blocks of text with some images dotted around them.
We live in interesting times indeed. I want my web better.
Re:I feel sad. (Score:5, Insightful)
I feel sad about it when hardware acceleration is needed for rendering, what, websites.
Boo hoo. Have you seen what's capable with HTML5, Javscript and canvas? It's downright stupid to have certain things done using a general purpose processor when a GPU is sitting there unused. Why do I get the impression that a subset of slashdot users wished things would remain unchanged from 1998, back when hate for Microsoft was warranted and their ability to hand code crappy html was relevant??
What'll you bet... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What'll you bet... (Score:5, Funny)
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I mean seriously, we're talking about HTML here for chrissake. Wide-scale adoption is beyond inevitable, and it such a core technology that it will happen with extreme rapidity.
Re:What'll you bet... (Score:4, Funny)
I don't want flying images in my browser (Score:5, Interesting)
What about those of us who don't want to see flying-rotating-3d-semitransparent-glowing-shaded adverts flying across our web pages.
I want fast clean loads of information. Not bloated pages full of shiny dodads designed to divert my attention from the information I am looking for.
Re:I don't want flying images in my browser (Score:5, Funny)
What about those of us who don't want to see flying-rotating-3d-semitransparent-glowing-shaded adverts flying across our web pages.
Just use Lynx.
Re:I don't want flying images in my browser (Score:4, Funny)
He also forgot to tell us to get off his lawn. Or was that implied?
It's About Freedom. (Score:5, Insightful)
What about those of us who don't want to see flying-rotating-3d-semitransparent-glowing-shaded adverts flying across our web pages. I want fast clean loads of information. Not bloated pages full of shiny dodads designed to divert my attention from the information I am looking for.
The Interwebs are about freedom, and you are free not to view any site you feel is offensive in some way. Interweb freedom is about the freedom to choose. IE9 chooses certain voluntary standards, and not other voluntary standards, and even creates some of its own voluntary standards. All of which you are free not to use because of the freedom to choose a different browser. It's about freedom. Freedom to choose, not freedom to be restricted to RMS' view of how the Interweb should be.
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Then don't visit those sites. Why is this hard for you?
More importantly, why are so many Slashdotters Luddites? It's just weird-- this is a tech site, why are you even reading it if you hate advances in technology so much?
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This is the decade of ignoring the majority and jamming what a few people want down the throats of the rest.
Since when did Slashdotters become the majority of internet users?
Re:I don't want flying images in my browser (Score:5, Funny)
This is the entire human history of ignoring the loud and obnoxious rabble and jamming what needs to be done down the throats of the scared, huddled masses
fixed that for you. only half meant as a joke.
Why bother ... (Score:3, Interesting)
So a few web sites want to use some fancy graphics. I only see their fancy graphics
Just make the browser work...it's fast enough already.
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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.
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You forgot a functional x86 emulator written in javascript so you can run Linux in Firefox in Linux in Firefox in Linux...
Re:Why bother ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never understood this 'my browser is faster than your browser' attention. Most people use their browser over the Internet, with download speeds that make any computer wait.
So you've completely missed the advent of Web applications? Little Web based games, chat, e-mail, social networking, word processing, image editing, and hundreds of other incredibly popular Web technologies are currently limited by the rendering speed as often as by bandwidth. People will wait for a Web app to load, but that doesn't mean they're okay with waiting for it to respond when they do something in it.
If you just use your computer to edit text, then the same could probably be said about OS's and computer hardware. Why bother improving their graphics capabilities? Of course to do so you have to willfully ignore how they are used by normal people today and the direction they have been developing. They don't develop things just for you.
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Okay but given that the vast majority of enterprise PC's are not using fancy GPU
You don't need a fancy GPU for this. You just need a GPU. We're not talking about a GeForce GTX480 here, just something that can work with DirectX. Every computer sold in the last decade has such a chip on board.
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Re:Why bother ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot is filled with Tech luddites. Kinda odd.
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Just make the browser work...it's fast enough already
It's fast enough for websites. It's not, by far, fast enough for applications.
Thank God! (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm often left sitting there for microseconds while the page is rendered in software. I'm sure having hardware accelerated rendering of web pages would change my life immeasurably.
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?
Re:Thank God! (Score:4, Informative)
Shouldn't the OS handle this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Really shouldn't the Operating System be using hardware rendering for graphics calls?
Yes I know that they are probably using D2D or DirectX to handle this but don't the hardware graphics calls in Windows use hardware acceleration already?
I hope that Xwindows does I know that OpenGL does but over all an application shouldn't have to care about "hardware" at all! That is why we have Operating Systems.
Re:Shouldn't the OS handle this? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the problem is that most applications use older APIs that aren't compatible with a hardware-accelerated rendering pipeline. They don't double buffer, they update parts of the screen at random, and they may even use controls that plot individual pixels. Those things are nearly impossible to accelerate.
WPF applications (and GDI+?) applications get acceleration provided by the OS. I suspect that IE uses good old Windows GDI, which has some bottlenecks on Vista and Windows 7 since it has to go through an extra layer now that the OS isn't using GDI under the hood.
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LWARCDR did not complain. He asked a technical question: should this acceleration be handled by the OS, or the browser? His question applies to IE, Firefox, and Chrome as well. There was no MS bashing in the post: the author includes XWindows as an example.
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"PC games do have their own graphics routines, don't they?"
Yes and no.
Games use DirectX which is part of the OS. But Games are not your typical application. They often go into a full screen mode and are not often run in a Window. They also have "game engines" but those tend to interface to DirectX, OpenGL, or what not.
A browser is not a video game.
It has to play nice with other applications and is rarely the primary user of CPU cycles.
Nobody cares how much memory a game uses or how many cycles it takes.
Brow
The slowest part of my browser... (Score:2)
Re:The slowest part of my browser... (Score:4, Funny)
OpenGL for other OS? (Score:2)
What hardware acceleration of web page rendering could/will android and chrome OS use? (OpenGL ES?)
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throw hardware at the problem (Score:2)
He... It make sense, since "Hardware is cheap and programers are expensive".
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/12/hardware-is-cheap-programmers-are-expensive.html [codinghorror.com]
My main problem with IE is not speed, is rather fast. The real problem with IE is how broken, unsafe and unstandard is. Making it faster, will just make it faster to infect computers, show poorly rendered pages, and ignoring standard CSS3 keys.
Look at this tables, the support for CSS3:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc351024(VS.85).as [microsoft.com]
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The hardware is already there, what's the point of NOT using it? If I have a gtx285 or something ridicilous and it's sitting there not being used that is WASTED. It's Win/Win for everyone.
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The "throw hardware at it" does make sense for business applications. However, that model fails at system hardware and mass production. If you manage to make a mainstream OS 1% faster, with the use of 1 coder working one year, 10 Million PC will get 1% faster. If you produce 100.000 washing machines, you cannot afford to put a 10 dollar CPU in each of them , you will have to optimize to run the OS on a 1 $ CPU.
Why don't they just use WebGL like everyone else? (Score:2)
Re:Why don't they just use WebGL like everyone els (Score:2)
flying images on mac (Score:2, Informative)
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:flying images on mac (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow, seriously? I just ran the demo on my iMac and couldn't get above 10 fps.
Maybe you're running Snow Leopard? I'm still on 10.5, which has no OpenCL on board. Could it be that the latest versions of Safari and Firefox use OpenCL to accelerate these sort of things already?
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yes i'm using snow leopard so OpenCL maybe helping out
If that is true, then Microsoft is already late to a show they think they've started :-D
They should fix their rendering code first (Score:4, Funny)
for their shitty ie8 treats tag as a block level element. which means, you cant format or distribute long, populated forms properly with the use of divs, tables or any other form of structured output tag. adding "display : inline;" to a separate style declaration into the form tag doesnt fix it either. so, if you have any nested structure coexisting with the form, the tag acts like a or a
in regard to that structure in ie8. no other browser has this issue, not even ie6 has this issue.
this is a current hell, that i am in precisely at this second in time, and i have to fix their incompetence for my client.
so my advice to them is ; fix your browser before doing any 'acceleration'.
Flying Windows (Score:2)
Won't load for me on Firefox 3.6.3. Did we just Slashdot MS?
Unfair comparison with other browsers (Score:3, Insightful)
Firefox 3.6 on linux works like a dream with demo (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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I can't believe all the negative posts... (Score:4, Insightful)
Given that they control the OS and API (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Who understands "throws down Gauntlet"? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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That's the problem, exactly. Everyone knows what Gauntlet [wikipedia.org] is, and throwing it anywhere is an offense worthy of painful death.
We cannot abide such sacrilege!
Terrible idiom...
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Why do people keep using idioms which don't mean anything in the modern language any more?
On naive reading it would sound like IE9 is giving up.
Right, they're quitting because that stupid Elf keeps shooting all the food.
Re:Who understands "throws down Gauntlet"? (Score:5, Insightful)
In short, you're a dolt.
Re:Who understands "throws down Gauntlet"? (Score:5, Funny)
I goodthink his assertion. Goodspeak clear. Unreal wordpics doubleunclear. Unreal wordpics make badthought. Unmodern peoplegroups had unhealth from doubleplusungoodthinking wordpics.
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God, I hope so!
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No, they're using completely standard HTML, CSS and Javascript for this demo. The only difference is that the scripting they've created consumes a lot of CPU cycles, which makes the animation it produces choppy. In IE9 they've added hardware accelleration, which makes it less apparent you're running a really hefty Javascript, because both your CPU and GPU kick in to do the processing.
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