IE9 Flaunts Hardware-Accelerated Canvas 265
An anonymous reader writes "Over on the IE blog they have a rundown of IE9's hardware accelerated support for the canvas element. They write, 'With the recent release of the latest IE9 platform preview, we talked about how we're rebuilding the browser to use the power of your whole PC to browse the web, and to unlock a new class of HTML5 applications. One area that developers are especially excited about is the potential of HTML5 canvas. Like all of the graphics in IE9, canvas is hardware accelerated through Windows and the GPU. In this blog post we discuss some of the details behind canvas and the kinds of things developers can build.'"
what about the video tag? (Score:2, Interesting)
will ie9 support that?
Re:what about the video tag? (Score:4, Informative)
Er... I'm pretty sure that MS said they would support the video tag back when IE9 was announced. A few months back, they said which format it would support (H.264), although just a week or two ago MS said they would also support WebM if the codec was installed.
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The video tag will work basically like any MS video setup does: If Windows knows how to play something, meaning the DirectShow codec is installed, then it'll do so. If you have a format that it doesn't know how to play, the codec must be installed. Well, in Windows 7, H.264 is one of the included codecs, WebM is not (which isn't a surprise since it didn't exist when 7 was developed). As such you'd need to install WebM DirectShow codecs.
Works the same for any program that uses DirectShow to play its media, l
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That's actually not the case in IE 9: for security reasons (well, OK, a bunch of reasons, but reading between the lines, security's the big one), arbitrary codecs aren't supported within the browser [msdn.com]. It'll ship only with H.264 support, and they've announced that WebM will be supported as an add-on [msdn.com], but that's it at the moment.
I don't really blame
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It already does... seriously, it's not like the platform preview is hard to find, or hasn't been discussed in the tech news world lately, or anything like that.
Actually, since Video playback is hardware-accelerated (as with Canvas), it turns out that IE9 handles video streams better than the released browsers that implement it, such as Chrome.
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A house built on sand cannot stand. (Score:5, Interesting)
We developed a web based game BattleCell [battlecell.com] that uses Ajax/CSS instead of Flash for all the heavy lifting. We discover at least one new bug in the IE rendering engine every month. Our pile of IE bugs in the back room that we have to track every time we develop a new feature is testament to the dread with which we view this new hardware-based rendering engine. We know what we're doing.
Just last week, we learned that once you have a stack of enough semi-transparent layers (combination of PNGs with alpha channels coupled with DIVs with various opacity CSS settings), IE fails to render the top-most layers. This doesn't happen after 20-30 layers. This happens after 5-7 layers. At first we thought our code was faulty, until we realized that scrolling down such a page with multiple layers will cause text that was previously "invisible" to suddenly be rendered in its specified color... as we kept scrolling, the text would then disappear again. You get the idea.
Obviously, this all works flawlessly in Safari, Chrome, Opera. For IE, we get to re-architect all sorts of work-arounds --a house built on sand.
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Just drop IE support. It's not worth the effort. At least I wouldn't bother with anything alter than the newest version. Unfortunately IE still makes up half the visitors to my none geek sites but non-IE8 has dropped down to under 10% and those users convert to less revenue than other users.. so I've gradually dropped support. Nothing new is being tested for old versions of IE. I'm seeing the dropoff from IE accelerating as a whole. Firefox is at about 25%, Chrome and Safari make up another 15%, and Opera a
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Are you entering the bugs you find at connect.microsoft.com?
Re:A house built on sand cannot stand. (Score:5, Funny)
Last time I wanted to report a bug to Microsoft, they tried to bill me for "support". OK, it was 15 years ago, but I'm not much minded to go back and see if they've stopped beating their customers. It still hurts, man. It still hurts.
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Welcome to web developer world. Standard complaint code usually works in most of browsers and IE is always an exception.
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Your list of bugs would be extremely valuable to the IE team. I suggest sending it along, or at least seeing if they're addressed with the IE9 platform preview build.
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The game is a great idea. I suggested a similar game concept to someone on Evony maybe a year ago. Props on building it, I look forward to playing.
Re:A house built on sand cannot stand. (Score:4, Interesting)
Just last week, we learned that once you have a stack of enough semi-transparent layers (combination of PNGs with alpha channels coupled with DIVs with various opacity CSS settings), IE fails to render the top-most layers. This doesn't happen after 20-30 layers. This happens after 5-7 layers.
You're right that this is a bug. However, please also consider that your workaround has an additional bonus: Even when it works, drawing so many layers on top of each other ("overdraw" in computer graphics lingo) is a great performance strain. You might not notice it on your superfast gaming PC, but please also consider slower devices like netbooks, mobile phones and tablets. The iPad would probably render it correctly, but I guess at a single frame per second, maybe even less.
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I share this type of experiences. IE is a bad program.
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Yeah, because a bug in some obscure corner case means the whole product is shit right? There are buglists for all those products. People didn't used to write web pages like that, give em a break
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Yeah, because a bug in some obscure corner case
Z-Index plus transparency is not a corner case. They're both major features of the specified feature set. If you can argue with a straight face that Z-Index (part of CSS) or transparency (part of various file formats) failing is a corner case, it proves only that you are some sort of advanced apologist and liar or completely ignorant. IE is the ONLY browser which doesn't make standards compliance a major selling point. What more do you need to know about Microsoft's 3E strategy?
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Gp said he was stacking a large # of them, in a new way that no app ever did, that makes it a corner case
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Gp said he was stacking a large # of them, in a new way that no app ever did, that makes it a corner case
No, he said he was stacking a moderate number of them when IE failed, while other browsers did not fail with a large number of them.
It doesn't matter HOW many you add, if the spec permits you to add them, it should NEVER fail simply because you added one more, unless you've run out of all system memory. Failing when you have just a handful of these layers points to a truly sophomoric mistake.
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So IE8 is still beta?
just the canvas? (Score:2)
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The whole browser is hardware accelerated by the new Direct2D and Directwrite API's. It's just that the biggest noticeable advantage is the speedup of the canvas element which is used to manipulate a lot of graphics. Firefox nightly alphas had it working before the first IE9 preview was released and it will be in FF 4.0. Firefox devs are also working on OpenGL acceleration for other platforms but that's much further away.
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You do realize that that's what Direct2D and DirectWrite essentially are, right? Ways to render lines and fonts using the hardware instead of software rasterisers? There's no point in making the entire thing an opengl surface, however, when you can create APIs that give you finer-grained control over things than that.
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You do realize that that's what Direct2D and DirectWrite essentially are, right? Ways to render lines and fonts using the hardware instead of software rasterisers?
Wow! You mean like we were doing on Windows 3.0 in 1990?
When the heck did Windows _stop_ being hardware accelerated?
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I think he meant gpu accelerated vs calculating all those lines and changes with the cpu and then sending the commands to draw them.
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All of the graphics in IE9 are build on top of Direct2D (including SVG). It is not just the canvas.
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Did no-one tell microsoft? (Score:2)
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Actually, most tablets, phones, and netbooks have enough GPU to do a decent job of accelerating IE9. I tried it on my tablet - ultra-low voltage core 2 duo at 1.2 GHz, with Intel Integrated 3100 crap for graphics... it wasn't as good of framerates as on my gaming box, but I could certainly get decent performance (30-60 FPS) on the canvas tests. Considering that other browsers currently get around 4-12 in most cases, even on my gaming box, I think that's an acceptable showing for the graphics of a tablet.
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Mobile devices will also start moving towards hardware accelerated browsers. I'm hoping it's sooner rather than later, as it will spell death for their precious walled gardens.
Good ideas never die, they just rebrand (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a little different (Score:3, Informative)
DirectDraw was just basic graphics acceleration. Mostly what DD offered was the ability to write things quickly to video memory, as one could do in DOS. It had support for blitting, calling page flips, and so on. More or less the kind of stuff you could do when you had low level access to everything in the system, but which you couldn't really do with a GUI in the way directly.
This all got deprecated by default with the advances in Direct3D and so on. You could just use a texture quad to do all that to the
It's all slipping through their fingers (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft finally caved and built the canvas tag! ActiveX: Bonk with radioactive danger signs. Silverlight: Bonk. SVG? Meh, retained mode scenes with tags all over again. Souped up VML. I'm going to give that a Bonk too (even though it was hardware accelerated).
But canvas, now that's a pixel buffer: simple and beautiful! Now we are *talking*. DING DING DING!
Microsoft's building in canvas is a huge concession that they are losing mindshare to HTML5. And what they're doing is half right by building theirs faster and all micro-optimized and kernel-hooked as they love to do.
But this won't save them, they won't recapture the mojo. Well... that is, not until they backport these new HTML5 features to XP. Here's my take: adding features to an IE that is locked to Windows 7 does not make consumers want to buy Windows 7. Not when it is far simpler for the consumer to install a competing browser that runs on XP (and earlier.) I will go as far as to say that adding canvas to Windows 7's IE is really just advertising new features in the competition's browsers.
I love this canvas tag move by Microsoft, and its far overdue! But they're not back in the game until they stop all this nonsense and backport IE9 to XP (and, heck, Win2K while you're at it!) If your retort is "oh it costs too much to support, oh the API's have changed, oh you should upgrade your 9 year old turd of an OS!". C'mon. Cost? API's? We're talking about moneybags Microsoft here! They can do whatever they want; I have no pity for them when or if they fail due to another botched marketing plan and neither should you. And I will not upgrade my XP/Server 2003 until the reboots get faster on Windows 7. It takes my friend 5 minutes on cherry hardware to get a usable desktop after reboot, and his harddrive is always doing something in the background when nothing is going on! On my XP, the harddrive is quiet unless I am doing something with it, the CPU is idle unless I do something.
Upon further reflection over canvas ... Here's a thought Microsoft, maybe I can meet you half way. How's about backporting canvas to IE7/8 but with no hardware acceleration? This way you can sell the merits of a Windows 7+IE9 upgrade. See, I can be reasonable. :)
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But canvas, now that's a pixel buffer: simple and beautiful! Now we are *talking*. DING DING DING!
We'll get back to this discussion after you first run into an HTML5-enabled website that will use canvas for everything so as to not let you copy/paste or block ads...
Seriously, it's a great thing when used right, but the possibilities of abuse are so huge that I'm scared of what's coming on that front.
No kidding (Score:2)
HTML5 scares me, because I think it will lead to a farm more annoying web. For example I run Firefox because of Flashblock. I've not yet found anything like it in IE (the ones I have found work for crap). So why do I block Flash? Because I am an anti-flash zealot? No. Because it slows down browsing? No, my system is a heavy hitting quad core, it can spare lots of power for shiny effects. So why then?
Because Flash is used for the power of annoying. All over the damn web Flash it used for ads in an extremely
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Canvas is not to create all the page! (Score:2)
The ammount of wrong on the IE team is amazing. I am looking at the test, and I want to murder these dudes.
Canvas is not create to replace Flash, to create fullpages in canvas. This is a idiotic idea, and if some people run with it, we are trully fucked. Canvas is to enhance our hability to create webpages with things that nowdays are not possible. This is things like graphics of sales and useage dinamically written. Using canvas to create a page mutch like flash, adds nothing to the web, actually make it
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With or without those Microsoft demos, you know that lots of people will still go that route. You have the same choice as before with Flash-only so-called websites: try to navigate them to access the desired content or simply go elsewhere.
At least with hardware-accelerated canvas, it's going to be much faster than Flash on non-Windows systems.
GPU virus (Score:2)
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Why the smoke and mirrors?
See what you wrote above:
So basically instead of just writing a windows app, people are going to write IE-9 specific HTML 5 extended (or enhanced) pages that load only on Windows systems
That.
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BMO
Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this (Score:5, Informative)
I tried these canvas-based apps on Windows 7 in various browsers.
The ones I tried work in Firefox 3.6.6, Opera 10.60, and Chrome 5.0.375.99.
On Firefox 3.6.6, they're all horrifically slow.
Opera 10.60 worked a little better than Firefox did, but not by much.
Chrome 5.0.375.99 worked about the same as Opera 10.60 did.
Note: My nVidia drivers are from back in November last year, due to a bug in newer nVidia drivers with the game Shattered Horizons. Not sure if that would affect rendering speeds or not.
Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this (Score:4, Insightful)
Side note:
I installed the IE9 Preview just to see what they would run like in there... they run quite fast.
Then again, MS provided demos aren't exactly the best way to test this.
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The provided demos really specifically test how fast the browser can draw N images (or whatever), with variations (alpha channel, scaling etc). I don't see what's wrong with such a test if you want to specifically test 2D rendering performance.
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I don't give a flying fuck about Microsoft and most of their business failures over the past few years have been their own fault, but I do like the fact that they are also, under great pressure of becoming irrelevant, moving towards a standards compliant browser.
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The fact that all the HTML 5 stuff that I have tried that were not provided by MS makes me wonder if these are legit.
That said, the asteroids one they linked to ran as fast as a native app in my chrome nightly build (I use the nightly build because they come in a self contained zip file which allows me to get around the no-install restrictions from my work which still uses ie6)
http://www.kevs3d.co.uk/dev/asteroids/ [kevs3d.co.uk]
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I would try it, but I don't seem to be getting Direct2D rendering... their SVG rotation test page is still really SLOW when I make an image full screen.
Weird thing is, all my addons show up as disabled.
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I should note that this is after I set the font directwrite mode to true and font rendering mode to 6.
Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this (Score:5, Informative)
Things like texture mapping, gradients, alpha blending, etc.. are just not efficient with GDI, and supporting them would only be for a single kind of plotting device (video cards) so it just doesnt make sense to roll those things up into GDI when there are HAL's specifically tailored for those purposes.
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And this time they would do it not by breaking standards, but by implementing them really well.
Those devious bastards, how dare they!
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IE9 now passes all of css3info's test suite for CSS3 and HTML5. (That doesn't mean it has 100% support for HTML5/CSS3, just the css3info test suite).
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Yeah, it could pass every test suite on the planet, but that doesn't mean they can't *add* their own little bit of kit to "extend" it in an incompatible or even *patented* way. Look at what they did with kerberos, or like, *any other standard* they've dealt with. To Microsoft, "standards are for chumps."
Saying "Microsoft is standards compliant THIS time" is just too much to swallow.
Go ahead, softies, mod this one down too. I have more karma than you.
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BMO
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Passing every test suite on the planet now and in the future would keep me happy.
Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, it could pass every test suite on the planet, but that doesn't mean they can't *add* their own little bit of kit to "extend" it in an incompatible or even *patented* way
You mean, like every other browser out there does? Have you seen how many "-webkit-*" CSS properties are there?
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It's more or like, what you can do with those webkit- and moz- settings. like using css3 features already now. and so on. You can enhance specific browsers without breaking standards.
But MS does not enhance it with obviously local flavour, like naming their own finetuning tags "ms-" or "ie9-" or sth. They do crazy stupid exceptional stuff, that does not reveal itself and reinterprete standard tags breaking compatibility.
A
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No, I mean stuff like this [safaribooksonline.com] which people use today already to make iPhone/iPad-specific websites that break everywhere else.
It's funny how history repeats... MS has considered "-webkit-text-size-adjust" so popular that IE in Windows Phone 7 will support it, despite it not being any kind of standard. Can you say "document.all" and "innerHTML"?
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While nonstandard addons are a problem, nonstandard addons which aren't documented for other people to implement are much worse.
Many of the nonstandard css properties are in-development implementations of new standard features which don't properly comply to the standards yet... Having the beta features under their own properties until they're working correctly is arguably a lot better than having straight broken implementations.
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Saying "Microsoft is standards compliant THIS time" is just too much to swallow.
Cognitive dissonance hurts, but IE9 really is supporting standards well, focusing on open API's, and abandoning proprietary extensions. In IE7, 8 and now 9 they've gradually been disabling proprietary API's, and IE9 in IE9 mode will only have vendor extensions that follow the best practices we've come to expect from all the browser makers (vendor-specific name space, implementing features based on published draft specs).
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You're forgetting fast here. Remember Active-X? Microsoft supported HTML well back in the day, and extended it with their own active-x... Result, hundreds of websites that wouldn't work cross platform because they used active-x, not html.
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ActiveX is a plugin API, the other guys all had one (netscape had NPAPI). What people blame microsoft for is ActiveX actually being successful, not the concept of browser plugins. ActiveX was used in apps to do stuff you couldn't do in HTML (and still can't do). Why not hold microsoft accountable for the stuff they did that was actually out of the ordinary? The main thing microsoft did wrong was not the development of proprietary features, but rather the complete lack of development between 2001 and 2006.
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Uh, well it depends on something that isn't clear to me: Is >canvas< and the specific features thereof they're talking about IE9 specific, or is it part of the html5 standard? If it's part of the standard, but hardware accelerated through IE9, then that's probably okay. Even if it means developers assume an IE9 target and do more with the tag than would be practical to do on non-accelerated browsers. I mean sure IE has a, shall we say, privileged position on Windows, but it's not like other apps c
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Except that the only way to do so will be to use the standard, w3c provided tags... If other browsers accelerate it to (protip, they're working on that), then that's a win for everyone, no matter what.
We're not talking silverlight here, just plain ole html(5)
Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe you could take your non-IE9 browser to the demo pages linked from the article you'll be able to see if they're doing something standard or something non-standard.
Here's a link:
http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Graphics/DeepZoom/Default.html [microsoft.com]
Rather than telling you what will happen if you go to that page in, say, Safari, I'll let you go ahead and experience it for yourself. Just think of the thrill you'll get when finding that you're totally right that MS just can't do anything to spec, or maybe you'll be thrilled to find that, OMG!!!!, they're adhering to the draft standards as they exist today.
Which do you think it is? The anticipation almost makes you want to pee, doesn't it?
(Next time spend ten seconds to find out before you shoot your mouth off and demonstrate the accuracy of the old saw: "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.")
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http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Graphics/DeepZoom/Default.html
That photo was awesome. Wonder how they took it.
Oddly enough it ran better in IE8 than FF3.6.
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Looks very nice and is even quite smooth on my sucky laptop with intel GPU. I got around 24 fps average when scrolling at a not very fast speed in a 1140 x 628 window. I'm running firefox 3.6.6 on ubuntu 10.04
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The waterfall (Yosemite falls) was were I proposed to my Fiancée in March. Brought a smile to my day.
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Now we have the cpu, gpu, bandwidth and OS, they can rebuild that walled garden and milk us all dry again.
Pay per play 3d for the masses done MS style.
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You have a GPU generally for accelerating 3D things. What microsoft is doing is also accelerating the 2D stuff. For 3D, it's widely expected that WebGL will become the standard for drawing to a canvas, and as it's so so so similar to OpenGL ES 2.0, it's highly unlikely to not be hardware accelerated.
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People look at GPUs for 3D acceleration because that's both the most noticeable improvement vs. software rendering, and because we're still pushing the limits on GPU 3D capability. However, GPUs are also widely used for 2D acceleration, and have been for many years - since before 3D hardware acceleration in conventional PCs was even available. Things that the GPU commonly does to speed 2D up include cursor rendering, font antialiasing, alpha blending, and more. The Direct2D API is just another way to utiliz
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Why we would want this? The real question is why Microsoft is the one doing this first.
Being first at something is good for PR, and implicitly casts shadow on the competition. For example, Chrome was first at JITed lighting-fast JavaScript, and that gave it a hefty popularity boost among web developers, and forced other browser vendors to scramble to reimplement their JS engines.
At the same time, canvas (and SVG) acceleration is pretty much pristine ground - and it is also easy to show off with cute demos...
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Huh? Canvas is canvas. Hardware-accelerated canvas is just faster and smoother to interact with. As a web developer I'm all for hating on IE, but Microsoft has made IE8 fully tolerable and it's looking like IE9 might actually be on the same level of other modern browsers.
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Uh no, this is a way of coding cross platform, cross browser applications that run on any platform. All MS are pushing here is that IE9 is especially fast at rendering them. It'll take not very long for all the others to catch up.
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So basically instead of just writing a windows app, people are going to write IE-9 specific HTML 5 extended (or enhanced) pages that load only on Windows systems and pretty much perform the same things a windows app would do (hardware accelerated).
It's not "HTML5 extended". It's vanilla HTML5, there's nothing special the app has to do to enjoy accelerated canvas and SVG in IE9.
Consequently, an app written that way is still cross-platform. What's more, IE9 is not the only upcoming browser that's going to offer hardware acceleration - Firefox has it in unstable builds already, as well (though on Windows only so far, IIRC), and I believe Chromium is catching up as well?
In any case, the rationale is the same as why Chrome introduced V8, raising the bar f
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Eh? What rock have you been sitting under?
CANVAS is a standard HTML5 element.
Hardware acceleration is coming to, or already is in some browsers.
Why would you NOT want this? Microsoft are actually competing for crying out loud, that is like a miracle if i ever saw one.
The only stupid part about all of this is MS don't seem to be backporting IE9 to XP because "Direct2D" is apparently only possible because the pure AWE of Windows 7...
At least, this was the last time i heard about it, they could well be doing
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Hardware-accelerated graphics are not a lock-in strategy, just like JIT-ing javascript engines aren't one either. IE9 will run the exact same code as the other guys, it will just run it faster. Notice how these demos are all compatible with all browsers, but just outline how much faster IE's implementation of the same standards is. It's up to the other guys to innovate and catch up. Firefox 4 will have hardware-accelerated graphics, Safari 5 already has it on the mac. Chrome will need to play catch-up for o
Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's fast but can it render the page correctly? It doesn't much matter how fast it is if it doesn't do it right. IE8 is still a big turd - have they actually fixed IE9 or is it all smoke and mirrors by posting speed results? The last results I saw proved that they could pass the tests they wanted to pass but that they failed horribly at real world results. I guess if it's good enough for the education system then it's good enough for web browsers eh?
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And when they say that they want to use all PC resources - are they really providing anything useful with that or are they just going to hog the whole computer?
Maybe Microsoft should take a course in how to write efficient and safe code first. By integrating and using a lot of features like GPU:s and other stuff you will also limit which platforms the software can be used on as well as building a solution that contains a complexity that can be hard to grasp and maintain in the long run. A great opportunity
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And when they say that they want to use all PC resources - are they really providing anything useful with that or are they just going to hog the whole computer?
For me, a browser is mostly a clumsy way to find and read documentation, buy shit, or waste time on Slashdot. For an increasing majority, it seems, a web browser is everything.
By integrating and using a lot of features like GPUs and other stuff you will also limit which platforms the software can be used on ...
For Microsoft, there can be only one pl
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds? (Score:4, Funny)
One of the things I like the most about Windows 7 is that unlike XP my RAM actually is being used for something useful, instead of sitting empty most of the time. I have about 500Mb of my 8Gb free, because thanks to Superfetch Windows knows which programs I use and when and has them waiting in RAM for me.
Linux has this as well. It's called Preload [sourceforge.net].
jdb2
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Their Acid3 score has gone up from 68/100 to 83/100 since the last platform preview, so yeah, it seems they're definitely making progress. IE8 only scored 20/100.
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In fact, no matter the average slashdotter bias, Microsoft has all the resources to make fully compliant products. Problem is, that is not a goal for them. Market domination is. That's why I prefer to base my stuff on free software, and that's why I prefer FF and Opera over chrome safari and IE. Putting Opera in the same league of Firefox, because Opera has not enough power to unilaterally extend standards, so compliance is a primary goal for them. Chrome in the same league of safari and IE because Chrome i
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It's fast but can it render the page correctly? It doesn't much matter how fast it is if it doesn't do it right. IE8 is still a big turd - have they actually fixed IE9 or is it all smoke and mirrors by posting speed results?
That isn't my experience at all. My experience is that IE8 got the basics right. They support CSS2 as well as the other guys, or better. Yes, it didn't support next-gen web standards, but most of those weren't even standards when IE8 was in development. With IE9 it's all about the next-g
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Even worse - they will be victims of new invented features by Microsoft that opens new interesting holes that nobody can think of yet.
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You seem badly misinformed as to what ActiveX is. It's a plugin API, serving exactly the same purpose as the Netscape-derived plugin API that Firefox, Opera, and Chrome use. It's a way to run binary code in the browser window. Flash uses an ActiveX control, for example.
Now, the fact that there was a time when the default security on the plugin API was very poor (meaning any website could run any ActiveX that was installed, and many of them weren't properly secured) is undeniable, but come on, IE6 is almost
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Your ridiculous whining has nothing to do with standards, or with activex.
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Chrome doesn't use anything that is as cross-platform as XUL, its elements (esp. the engine; yes it's webkit but it's not the exact same version of webkit everywhere) are more local.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Every time I hear "hardware accelerated" associated with the browser, I feel as though they have essentially given up trying to unbloat their browser and operating system so they are trying to make up for it by pushing off such tasks to the hardware. ... Other browsers get by just fine without hardware acceleration.
So fine, indeed, that Safari [gadget-space.com] has already added it, and Firefox [icrontic.com], Chrome [google.com] and Opera [avencius.nl] are all scrambling to implement it.
Seriously, have you even seen the demos? It's not about "needs acceleration to be as fast as other browsers" at all. It's about "5-10x faster than browsers without acceleration".