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.
Re:So? (Score:5, Funny)
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Fringe? It's still 60% of the browser usage:
http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0 [netmarketshare.com]
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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.
Which websites? (Score:3, Informative)
Oh God (Score:3, Interesting)
I wish I could introduce you to the hell that is HP's partner portal, their Learning Center, the portal for support. It's a carnival of the obscene. As someone who understands web design I have to hope there's a special level of hell devoted to eternally tormenting these web developers.
Not only do these sites require specific versions of IE, but then you come to a certain point where they don't even work with those, so you have to migrate the session to other browsers through trial and error until you fi
Re:Oh God (Score:5, Funny)
Careful now, you might get PETA involved with you torturing the poor rats with Phil Collins "music'
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Re:Which websites? (Score:5, Funny)
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Arrrg! My eyes! The browsers, they do nothing!
Re:So? (Score:5, Funny)
Wow! MS has really outdone themselves this time... IE9 doesn't go public beta until the 15th and they've already gotten 60% market share? I'm amazed...
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
Re:So? (Score:5, Informative)
Fringe? It's still 60% of the browser usage:
http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0 [netmarketshare.com]
Re-read OP's post. They are discussing IE9, which does not run on those things (unlike various other versions of IE). So... the 60% marketshare stat you provide is irrelevant to their premise.
In addition, read MSDN's post. It says...
(translated)"HEY!!!! We're FINALLY first with SOMETHING!!!! Let's rub it in everyone else's faces!!!!!!! Maybe they wont notice the fact that once again we wont be compliant with web standards!!!"
(in MS Marketing Speak) "We’re excited that other browsers have started to use hardware to accelerate graphics performance. With different implementations starting to become available, now’s a good time to blog about the difference between full and partial hardware acceleration."
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Unfortunately, Firefox's stubborn refusal to pass Acid3 legitimizes IE9's stubborn refusal to do the same. The dev team needs to swallow its pride and implement the standards.
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If IE8 is any indication, Firefox comes a damn sight closer to passing.
Not perfectly in compliance, granted, but really rather close when compared to what it looked like in IE for me.
Re:So? (Score:5, Informative)
If IE8 is any indication, Firefox comes a damn sight closer to passing.
Not perfectly in compliance, granted, but really rather close when compared to what it looked like in IE for me.
Firefox does 97, IE9 does 95 on Acid3.
Re:So? (Score:5, Informative)
People should get over Acid3.
Some of the features Acid3 tests for are already obsolete (SVG fonts superseded by WOFF) while other crucial features are still buggy.
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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:5, Insightful)
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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.
Re:So? (Score:5, Informative)
"Chrome still doesn't support basic features like saving tab state after a restart"
Factually incorrect.
Re:So? (Score:5, Informative)
Seeing that Chrome still doesn't support basic features like saving tab state after a restart
How is that different from:
Options->Basics->On Startup: Reopen the pages that were open last
Or are you making these claims without having actually used Chrome?
Misleading. (Score:3, Informative)
That's misleading. IE9 gets something like 96/100 in the Acid3 test.
That's absolutely OK for most practical purposes.
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Which, incidentally, rounds to 12/100. ;P
Re:Misleading. (Score:4, Informative)
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It's also not a probability situation, if you're a competent dev, you know or can look up what is and is not supported across browsers and platforms. You're not supposed to routinely implement something only to have an oh shit that doesn't work with browser X moment.
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.
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The reasons they gave for not passing those 5 tests seem pretty good to me. I don't honestly know how much use of SVG fonts there is in the real world, but given how many SVGs I run into on a regular basis, I'm going to guess "not much." Also, I seem to recall some discussion of the browsers that DO get 100 only implementing enough of several of the specs to pass acid3.
Re:So? (Score:5, Funny)
But thanks to GPU accelleration, IE9 fails the Acid3 test much faster.
Re:So? (Score:4, Informative)
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IE 9 still can't pass Acid3.
So what? According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3 [wikipedia.org] IE9 gets a 95 and Firefox got 94. Besides the ACID test is about how well a browser handles the testing of esoteric, completely fucked up, marginally correct coding. It's also testing compliance for stuff that isn't rarely if ever used, and some stuff that's not even in the current standard (e.g. the CSS2 recommendations that were later removed in CSS2.1, reintroduced in the draft CSS3). It simply doesn't represent the real world.
In particular, h
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.
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This is Microsoft we're talking about, they still are the *only* platform of importance.
Fixed that for you.
PS.. please ignore the pile of money behind me.
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:What good is... (Score:5, Funny)
You catch on quick don't you?
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It isn't either/or.
If your 180 watt graphics card cannot function without drawing less power than that, you have bigger problems. It would, for example, be drawing 180 watts in any modern composited desktop (windows 7/compiz/kde 4/os x). Fortunately, graphics cards don't always run at 100%.
Regardless, it's not either or - code can be made more efficient and be hardware accelerated. One of the real advantages of interpreted code is that we can make sensible and reusable decisions on how best to use hardwa
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Re:What good is... (Score:5, Funny)
"Cross-platform" means its usable on both Windows 7 and Windows Vista.
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Same difference. Like Windows 2000 and XP. Or 3.0 and 3.1 ;-)
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"Cross-platform" means that Windows hates you, and doesn't want your damn chocolates. Or your fucking flowers. Bastard.
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Playing devil's advocate here. Adobe Shockwave is pretty much Winhoze specific and games written in it are very much alive and kicking.
In fact the only reason it is still alive as a runtime is because it is hardware accelerated. So there is a niche for that which means that there will be a niche for a Windoze only browser with hardware accel.
Re:What good is... (Score:5, Informative)
That's fine, but realise that the web is about hypertext. Shockwave and flash are supposed to be on the web in the same way that movies and sounds are: as embedded elements of media. Building an entire site or app in shockwave or flash is NOT building for the web, it's only running a non-web app over http.
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Re:What good is... (Score:5, Informative)
I tried to submit something through the feedback thing, but as far as I can tell, things written there go nowhere, so who knows.
No, we read pretty much all the feedback (through filtered and clustered searches) -- the volume is very high, and so we can't respond to individual comments, though.
We are aware of the issue with hardware acceleration on certain setups. Try updating your graphics card drivers and try again?
-- Alexander Limi, Firefox User Experience Team
The best part about in-browser GPU acceleration... (Score:5, Interesting)
...is that thanks to the lack of an IOMMU on consumer x86 computers, JavaScript exploits in the browser can now give you access to all the computer's memory, and along with it, ring 0. I can't wait to see the first whitepaper on the subject :)
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Is this the fabled Scotch mist? [wikipedia.org]
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Color me surprised!
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...is that thanks to the lack of an IOMMU on consumer x86 computers, JavaScript exploits in the browser can now give you access to all the computer's memory, and along with it, ring 0.
You are claiming that the graphics drivers / host kernel give user processes the ability to read any location in the computers physical memory? Or is a separate vulnerability in the graphics driver required?
Re:The best part about in-browser GPU acceleration (Score:4, Informative)
The GPU, as it's normally on PCIe these days, has DMA capabilities. On most (all?) x86 systems DMA isn't restricted through an MMU, unlike CPU memory access. This means that by sending the correct commands to the GPU you can access any part of the system memory.
If this is possible in reality I have no idea, but that's the concept.
Re:The best part about in-browser GPU acceleration (Score:5, Informative)
AMD x86_64 processors have an IOMMU. Intel's first x86_64 processors didn't but I don't know if this is still the case. IOMMUs are also important if you are running virtual machine software that allows some VMs access to physical hardware -- Xen lets you do this, for instance.
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AMD x86_64 processors have an IOMMU. Intel's first x86_64 processors didn't but I don't know if this is still the case. IOMMUs are also important if you are running virtual machine software that allows some VMs access to physical hardware -- Xen lets you do this, for instance.
...and it might actually matter when you can actually find a motherboard with a chipset that also supports the IOMMU on the CPU. At the moment, that means an X58 chipset (socket 1366) for Intel, and for AMD, you're pretty much out of luck.
AMD 890FX IOMMU supported boards (Score:4, Informative)
See here [wikipedia.org] for a handful of AMD boards which do support the IOMMU present in the 890FX chipset. In addition, the ASUS M4A89TD Pro/USB3 supports ECC as well, which is nice. Sadly, outside of the server chipsets, the others in the 800 series do not support the IOMMU.
Great (Score:2, Insightful)
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If any program makes your GPU drivers crash, then take it up with the GPU manufacturer. If the drivers are crashing, then they're defective.
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Only bad operating systems, bad driver programmers and alcohol can make your drivers crash.
Re:Great (Score:5, Funny)
Only bad operating systems, bad driver programmers and alcohol can make your drivers crash.
If your Kernel panics, it's probably General Protection's fault. But the General will most likely blame it all on a crash caused by Major Device's driver, Private Page.
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:How do we change the debate to important stuff? (Score:5, Funny)
wow, GPL acceleration!
Of course! If its free software it must run faster! ;)
How fast is Apache, then?
(very funny typo ;)
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To be fair, all those activation schemes, Digital Restriction Management algorithms and anti-copying rootkits take up a significant amount of CPU%. GPL code has none of those.
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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:Who cares if most people use IE9 (Score:5, Informative)
> I don't see Flash going anywhere for at least a decade
No one cares that Flash exists. What's important is that it be possible to develop tomorrow's web sites without having to use Flash, and that it be possible to browse the web at least somewhat reasonably without having Flash (e.g. not all sites need to work, but there should be sites in a given category that work without Flash). That's a somewhat realistic goal right now; for example very few banks require Flash (though some do).
> Silverlight won't have the install base of HTML5
The goal is to keep it that way, yes.
> Apple doesn't have enough influence to change the direction of the web.
You apparently haven't had to deal with the "if it's on a cell phone it must be Webkit" mindset of developers of "mobile" sites. See the part dealing with -webkit-text-size-adjust at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/iemobile/archive/2010/05/10/javascript-and-css-changes-in-ie-mobile-for-windows-phone-7.aspx [msdn.com] which Microsoft was forced to take out later. Note that there have been calls for Gecko to similarly add support on mobile for some of the -webkit-* stuff Apple has been pushing people to use. Those calls have been resisted so far, but as for the future.... who knows.
*cough* (Score:2)
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What build/os? here's the best I could get from Windows 7-64:
Chrome 7 dev (had to manually turn on GPU acceleration): http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_fPLo8aIju-A/TIfgbvlguaI/AAAAAAAAOoc/dCc-Tj6IgUo/s400/2010-09-08_150824.jpg [blogspot.com]
FF 4 Beta 5 (as is): http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_fPLo8aIju-A/TIfgccSWk1I/AAAAAAAAOog/Wg6qzEH3_fk/s400/2010-09-08_150943.jpg [blogspot.com]
IE 9 platform preview (as is): http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_fPLo8aIju-A/TIfga8sAWVI/AAAAAAAAOoY/MW51u3pV53M/s400/2010-09-08_150745.jpg [blogspot.com]
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.
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Bug fixes don't sell. As long as it works good enough for most people...
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Speaking of Firefox bugs that should've been fixed ages ago but never have. There's my all time favorite bug: Bug 105843 - Cache lost if Mozilla crashes ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105843 [mozilla.org]). This bug basically says it all it is 9 YEARS old. So for well probably since Firefox has been made it has never cached anything right. Never set that browser cache too high one crash and it's all gone. I can't even begin to imagine how much extra data Firefox needs to download over other browsers. It's
Re:Pointless battles (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
He said a "tired strawman argument," which is one where the straw man is feeling rather listless and can't come up with anything better than a false dichotomy.
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I can't say any of those bugs have ever bothered me. The upload progress thing only slightly. If I can choose between a faster Firefox and proper upload progress I'd rather choose the former. Your definition of useless battles isn't the same as everyone's.
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Your "proper upload progress" would most likely involve Javascript or Flash, which not all people may have enabled or even installed on their computers.
The file input field bug is again one of the main reasons why lots of websites resort to using Flash or complex Javascript libraries to simulate an input field, because it's the only way to be sure it looks the same in all browsers (Chrome is a real problem here as their file input field looks totally different than the rest)
It's a pain in the ass to do work
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80/20 rule!
How many people try to load a 800x600 GIF with 8639 frames and thus benefit from a fix to that bug?
Now, how many people watch Youtube videos and javascript animations/games, which will be much faster and use less power with GPU acceleration?
Re:Pointless battles (Score:5, Interesting)
A 728x90 GIF banner would use 250 KB per frame and at about 30-100 frames per banner, you're looking at 10-30 MB per banner. How many GIF's are in an average page? Lots. How many GIFs are in lots of tabs? Lots. How many bug reports and complaints are on the 'net about Firefox using a lot of memory? Lots.
It *is* a bug that affects very few people *critically* (crashes) but it is one that makes the browser generally look bad in reviews and other tests, due to the memory usage.
The problem that's brought up every time is that it's impossible to know how big a GIF file is until it's fully downloaded, so they say they have to decode each frame and keep it cached in memory. However, a simple solution would be to keep both the compressed and uncompressed frames in memory and when a memory threshold is reached, dump the uncompressed frames and switch to real time decoding.
This way, for example, with a 32 MB threshold, small GIFs like banners would be fully decoded and kept in memory but with larger gifs, once the 32 MB limit is reached, the decompressed frames are dropped and only the compressed frames would be kept in memory, so Firefox would not crash.
Would have done it myself but I'm not good at the language used by Firefox developers.
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I can blame Firefox as much as I want when the same 8 MB grayscale GIF that crashes Firefox (>2 GB memory) makes Chrome use only 50 MB and Internet Explorer only 900 MB of memory.
Re:Pointless battles (Score:5, Informative)
You think that's bad? There was a critical bug in there for years that would completely overwrite your profile with a blank one, including your history, and bookmarks. Back when email was still integrated into the Mozilla browsers, your emails would get wiped too! The bug was caused by writing out the configuration files one line at a time, so that if the browser crashed during a configuration update, you'd be left with a partial configuration file. On the next startup, the browser would detect the error, and cheerfully overwrite your entire profile with the default profile to 'fix' it. The file contents were overwritten in-place, making disaster recovery practically impossible for most users. I won't even mention the performance hit of writing a 100KB file with 10,000 individual IO operations every time Firefox is closed, because compared to the data loss that's insignificant.
The Bugzilla forum had about 4 dupes of the bug, each with over a thousand panicked posts by users. Some of the reports when back years.
When it happened to me, it took me about an hour with Sysinternal's Filemon tools to figure out what was going on. The fix is trivial: simply write the new config file out-of-place, and then replace the original with it once it has been fully written. This is programming 101, standard practice for most Linux/Unix apps. Even Microsoft Office apps do this!
The bug went unfixed for at least 3 years after I first noticed it, despite at least a dozen posts by professional programmers who had even highlighted the source files and line numbers where the change needs to be made.
Bugzilla seems to be totally ignored by the Firefox programmers. I suspect that just like many open source programmers, they only care about the "shiny new stuff". Mundane work like fixing bugs is boring, so nobody does it unless forced to.
Re:Pointless battles (Score:5, Interesting)
neither you nor I fixed those bugs, either.
Have you tried fixing any Mozilla bugs? I have and it's a royal pain in the ass. You first post your patch to the bug itself, which is simple enough. Then the main cabal of developers critique your patch, and if it doesn't exactly conform in every possible way to what they would have coded themselves, they will reject it with little, if any, explanation. After you finally get an explanation out of someone, you can continue to submit changes to see if any will appease them. Of course, you will have accidentally violated a minor style guideline, but this won't be pointed out to you until you've submitted changes for their other critiques six times. After you've fixed that issue, they'll think of some other hoop that you'll have to jump through even though the patch fixes all aspects of the defect at this point. After another 16 edits of the three line patch that doesn't have any security implications and doesn't change any portion of the API, they'll ask you for a unit test that wouldn't test anything but the API for which they already have unit tests.
I'm all for being careful and making a stable, secure product, but I expect people to not be completely retarded about the process of writing software. Not even the system that delivers EAMs has a process this annoying for fixing trivial defects.
And *that* is why Mozilla defects don't get fixed for years.
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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
Yes, but will it bring all the boys to the yard? (Score:2)
Will they license/open this technology? Will they have to charge?
They better warm it up, we all are waiting.
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> Will they license/open this technology?
Which technology? Their methods of ignoring established design principles in favor of quick & dirty programming? Patented.
Gallium (Score:2)
There wouldn't be much to license; they'll simply be pushing high-level graphics calls down the API/driver stack to the graphics layer. The open equivalent would be for firefox/webkit to have high-level graphics API calls added to the X rendering libraries (cairo or whatever) and call those directly when running on systems that have the necessary libraries. The X-window graphics stack would then do its part, by providing high-level graphics primitives and high-level API functions implemented with fast, lo
When hell freezes over. (Score:2)
I don't care if Albert Einstein rises from the dead and announces on Colbert that he has proven that Internet Explorer's display technology is fastest that the laws of physics allow.
I still will not use any browser controlled by Microsoft.
So? (Score:2)
OK, so the display portion that takes milliseconds at most now takes 4-5 milliseconds less time. Meanwhile the browser's taking 10-30 seconds choking on bloated Flash, over-large images and hundreds of K of insanely-convoluted nested Javascript files. Somehow I don't think graphics acceleration will help speed up Web sites significantly.
It's kind of like cars: sure the McLaren F1 may be faster than my Ford Focus, but it's not the car that's setting the 75mph speed limit.
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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
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.
In other news... (Score:5, Informative)
IE9 cheats on popular benchmarks [mozilla.com] (scroll to the bottom). And they still come second-to-last.
Not surprising. (Score:3, Informative)
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In some countries, it's called Axe [wikipedia.org].
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Bloated fucking operating systems depending on FPUs for decent performance. What the hell?
Video, sound, panoramas, 3d... all there for years (Score:2)
What for? Object tags have been around for years, and can embed ANY type of content in a webpage. I was doing video streaming (along with custom play/pause buttons etc.) with them and the older embed tag back in 2000. I believe object has been around since '96, and embed longer. AND, object can support any multimedia content, including video, audio, flash, panoramas, applets, etc. I'm not sure how advanced/generic DOM scripting is for them, but that should be relatively
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Sadly, when the competition is also rendering it incorrectly, the comparison seems fair.
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Is IE really making the claim that they can incorrectly display your website faster than the competition?
Hmm...
wake me up when we don't have to waste an extra 20% fixing apps for IE
No they are not. RTFA. Most web sites are written against IE, so even if IE renders some little piece it differently than the spec implies it should, IE is showing it how the author intended and is therefore "correct".
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When viewing scaled video, it's a huge factor. And when using web applications (as opposed to reading the news) it's a significant factor. Oh, and when scrolling, not like anyone ever does that with webpages.
And we're not talking tenths of a millisecond here. If each scroll operation takes you 200ms (easy to run into without hardware acceleration on some sites out there that are sticking video or large translucent images over fixed-position backgrounds), you just lose.