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Microsoft on IE9: our hardware acceleration is better than yours
The entire post seems dedicated to hardware acceleration, however. Does IE9 have another weapon up its sleeve, or is this it? Perhaps we'll see a series of blog posts over the next few days detailing IE9's secret weapons -- but somehow I doubt it. The developer previews haven't produced any new and exciting technologies, but maybe Microsoft has saved something for the IE9 beta launch next Tuesday.
Internet Explorer 9's secret juice, incidentally, is a rendering pipeline that is hardware accelerated from end to end -- from the downloading of images and video into the graphics card's memory, through to the final composition made by the Desktop Window Manager in the IE9 window. To do this, IE9 leverages both Direct2D and DirectWrite for content rendering, and Direct3D for the actual composition. The blog post has a very nice diagram that details the process, if you're interested.
Microsoft claims that IE9 is the only browser that is fully hardware accelerated -- and while I can confirm that it has the edge on Firefox, I think Chrome might be a lot closer than Microsoft thinks. Of course, Chrome can't win: in a rather thinly-veiled attack, the post also points out that 'other browsers', with their mix of different subsystems and abstraction layers, won't be as fast or stable as IE9.
I'm bored of all this hardware acceleration talk! Where's the user interface? Will IE9 have add-ons, or an app store? Hardware acceleration is great and all, but first and foremost a browser has to be usable.
Comments
17
Subscribe to commentsAndroid underlingSep 10th 2010 3:10PM
Having tested firefox and ie9 out against each other, I felt ie9 was considerably better in regards to hardware acceleration.
John DSep 10th 2010 3:25PM
"Hardware acceleration is great and all, but first and foremost a browser has to be usable."
Not to argue, but isn't performance (and, by extension, hardware acceleration) a pretty big part of usability?
Sebastian AnthonySep 10th 2010 3:31PM
Yep, definitely -- but as yet we haven't even seen what the IE9 interface will be like, whether it's usable, or indeed even if it's extensible.
IE9 as a bit like the Dodge Viper right now -- all muscle, but not something you'd want to drive around town.
John DSep 10th 2010 3:45PM
Agreed. Extensibility (outside of ActiveX *shudder) will be great. I only use a couple extensions in Chrome, but I notice when they're not there.
KualaBeeSep 10th 2010 4:36PM
I have never used IE willingly, but I really like what I have seen with IE 9 previews. The Firefox 4.0 betas were/are very underwhelming (severe bugs and general choppiness), Chrome 7 is pretty good, but it's separate processes eats up way too much ram, and Opera.....well its Opera.
I think I have a fever b/c I am actually thinking of switching to IE 9 when it comes out lol. Waiting with anticipation for Sept 15 when the IE 9 beta comes out.
iofthestormSep 10th 2010 9:02PM
Eh, Chrome has less hardware acceleration than Firefox, so I'm not sure what you're talking about.
Sebastian AnthonySep 11th 2010 8:36AM
Gotta cite your references!
iofthestormSep 11th 2010 3:01PM
Hey, you're the one writing articles :P.
Don't quite have a source, but I hang around the mozilla dev community and according to them Chrome uses HW acceleration in less places than Minefield currently does.
Sebastian AnthonySep 11th 2010 3:32PM
Hehe -- well, from what I know, they're both using D2D at least, but we're not sure if Chrome's using D3D yet or not.
AnthonySep 11th 2010 1:29AM
I've tried running the HTML5 tests that require hardware acceleration on a VAIO with a ULV C2D and a GeForce Go 7400 in the fourth IE9 preview, Firefox 3.6.8, and the latest Minefield nightly (4.0b6pre). IE9 ran through the test with flying colors (literally, the IE9 "Psychedelic Browser" test achieved a score of 1758) while Firefox and Minefield achieved a mind-blowing score of... wait for it... 20 and 22. Running the same tests on the same computer using the Intel GMA 946 graphics enabled, IE9 achieved a score of 1567 while Firefox and Minefield recieved a score of 5 and 7. The same tests on an older Core Duo machine with a Mobility Radeon X1600 received a score of 17 in IE9 and 1 and 2 in Firefox and Minefield. Needless to say, IE9 is really fast.
Sebastian AnthonySep 11th 2010 4:58AM
Hehe, pretty damning results :)
Hardware acceleration doesn't seem to be turned on in FF right now, despite it apparently being 'on by default'. The results should be a bit closer than that!
DrakkenfyreSep 11th 2010 8:35AM
You think a browser needs an app store?
Wouldn't an app running in a browser, you know, be basically a standard app?
OskarSep 12th 2010 10:51AM
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2010/09/wrong_wrong_wrong.html
Sebastian AnthonySep 12th 2010 10:53AM
Yea, I've been looking into it.
I think the assertion that Firefox is faster is false (but FPS isn't a great metric when it comes to website design...)
And D3D doesn't work in Firefox at the moment (well, the whole hardware acceleration thing seems to be broken). Last I heard they were working on ironing out some bugs in the D3D implementation.
Once they get everything working, we'll see :)
OskarSep 12th 2010 11:18AM
Well I'm using latest nightly and I have Direct2D and Direct3D 9 enabled, and performance is back to 60fps. But yeah like you said, they still need to fix bugs that are still regressing performance. (before we got higher fps in FIshIE Tank when you go on more than 250 fishes) Btw. JaegerMonkey landed on trunk :)
Sebastian AnthonySep 12th 2010 11:22AM
Ah, cool, that was quick after the 'JS preview'!
The FishIE thing shows software acceleration speeds at the moment, I think. The psychedelic test seemed slower, too.
I need to do some more testing, but I'm actually out of time -- I'm off to San Francisco tomorrow for the IE9 event!
OskarSep 12th 2010 11:28AM
FishiIE Tank uses hardware acceleration :)