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Google pushes back hardware acceleration to Chrome 9
Hardware acceleration is a hot topic in the current browser market, as competitors attempt to differentiate themselves through speed. Somewhat surprisingly it's actually Internet Explorer 9 leading the way, with its decidedly Windows 7 biased approach. Google's Chrome browser has also flirted with hardware acceleration for many facets of its rendering engine, mainly targeted towards WebGL. But graphics are only one part of the work underway to tap into GPU power for site rendering.Yesterday Google branched off the soon-to-become Chrome 8 code from the Chromium project. With Chrome's rapid version iteration this is no surprise, and it indicates that Chrome 7 should be heading towards a stable, final release. However, according to Cnet, the branching has forced developers to push back a lot of the planned hardware acceleration APIs for things like fancy CSS rendering, large layers and opacity fixes. They join Chromium hardware-based video decoding, which isn't ready for prime time just yet and therefore already Chrome 9+ bound.
Although it might be disappointing to think that all that blazing GPU-goodness might sit dormant while browsing for a little longer in Chrome, Google's version milestones pass with about a six-week frequency. If the large part of hardware acceleration does land in Chrome 9 we should see it before mid-December, at least in the Chrome Dev Channel.
Comments
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Subscribe to commentsPrzemekOct 13th 2010 8:24AM
Strange but Chrome 8.0.552 is first in which GPU acceleration is switchable via about:labs instead of --enable-accelerated-2d-canvas so I do not know what is Cnet is writing about.
jkroederOct 13th 2010 9:00AM
Accelerated 2D canvas is just one facet of GPU acceleration. I suppose most of it just isn't ready yet.
2D Canvas, for example, does nothing but crash here on Canary and Chromium builds since the switch was made available. At least on my system it does.