Tag: RENDERING

WebKit, the rendering engine used by both Chrome and Safari, is currently undergoing major redevelopment in order to support per-tab processes and out-of-process plug-ins by default. In one smooth move, Apple will be able to bring Chrome-like speed and security to its Safari browser. Don't be fooled by its rather grand-sounding name of "WebKit2," however. This is more of an update than an ...

The IE9 platform preview has just been released. If you've downloaded it, you can now run a bunch of tests on the 'Test Drive' site to see just how fast and neat the new browser is. Incidentally, IE9 doesn't seem to work on Windows XP -- gasp! Will the final version work with XP...? Looking at the HTML5 tests, Opera has some serious competition for HTML5 support. In the keynote, Microsoft ...

It's the second day of Microsoft's developer event MIX10 and the keynote is being delivered right now! Yesterday we were treated to details of Windows Phone 7 and its streamlined Silverlight and XNA development -- today, Internet Explorer 9. A lot has happened since IE8: the downfall of IE6 and 7; the emergence of Google's big-hitter Chrome; and the maturity of Firefox. Internet Explorer has ...

Good afternoon! As I write this the sun is shining, the birds (and 'SEO specialists') are tweeting, and the sky is a brilliant and pure baby blue. It's spring, ladies and gentlemen, it's frickin' spring -- here in England, at least. My apologies if you live in Canada, or somewhere else barren and inhospitable; I'm sure spring will get to you eventually. A lot has been going on in the world of ...

Yesterday you read about Mozilla's effort to boost Firefox's Javascript processing speed with the new JägerMonkey engine. Now Asa Dotzler has blogged about another feature -- freshly landed in the Firefox nightly builds -- which should speed up the 'fox even more. The gfx.font value above is a new about:config value which toggles GPU accelerated rendering via DirectX 11's DirectWrite and ...

Hot on the heels of the announcement that IE9 would use Direct2D to improve its rendering performance, Firefox have stated their intent to do the same -- and sooner! In a a tweet, Chris Blizzard, an employee of Mozilla, said that Firefox would include Direct2D support -- and he bet it would be shipped sooner than IE9! Direct2D is a technology included in Microsoft's DirectX multimedia tools. ...

3DSee is a way to generate 3D models of real-life objects without doing a ton of complex drawing and tracing. You just need to take several digital photos of the object, and 3DSee can generate a greyscale "bump map" that it can use to render your object in three dimensions. Right now you can just get a low-res model textured from one of your images, but the software actually creates a ...

If you've ever used a mobile phone or PDA to surf the web, you've probably noticed that some sites render better than others on a small screen. That's because some web developers design special mobile versions of their pages. But there are also several web-based services that "mobilize" web sites by stripping some data and presenting you with a stripped down version of a web page. Probably the ...

Another day, another Google acquisition. Just in time for Pi Day, Google has scooped up @Last Software, makers of SketchUp, a 3D drawing app for Windows and Mac OS X. The @Last web site describes SketchUp as a "deceptively simple, amazingly powerful tool for creating, viewing, and modifying 3D ideas quickly and easily." In the announcement on the Official Google Blog, @Last's Jeff Martin ...

Every web designer who uses Windows goes through this: "Okay, it looks fine in Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera; what about Safari?" Unless you have the resources to keep a Mac around solely for this purpose, chances are you have to call up a Mac-owning friend or borrow their PowerBook to help you debug. SafariTest aims to remedy that by showing you an image of what your web site ...