Microsoft Talks IE9 and HTML5

Microsoft has been talking in some more detail about its upcoming update to its browser line, bringing us up to Internet Explorer 9, and how important hardware acceleration and HTML5 support are.

IE has been losing marketshare
since the introduction of
the browser ballot...

According to a posting on the Internet Explorer blog, the hardware acceleration aspect of Internet Explorer 9 is going strong, with some demonstrations showing that, once IE9 actually starts using your GPU, it’s capable of moving images around in real time at 60fps. The big upside here isn’t just the performance, but the impact it has on the rest of your system; normally the demonstrations shown off in the blog post would keep your processor busy, but with the work being offloaded to the GPU, then your processor can sit at around the 12% mark.

Of course, the other big change in IE9 is the move to support HTML5, which the team working on the browser seems to be very excited about indeed. Microsoft’s lead program manager for IE performance, Jason Weber said of the move, “It’s clear that HTML5 will enable a new class of applications that were previously not possible through standards based markup, and these applications can’t be limited by the performance of today’s browsers. Doing HTML5 right means enabling developers to build web applications that have the performance of desktop applications. That’s our objective with Internet Explorer 9 and why we’re so excited about hardware acceleration.”

It certainly makes for some interesting reading, alongside the breakdowns of how other browsers do in tests alongside Internet Explorer 9 in which GPU accelerated content is compared to normal, everyday non-hardware-accelerated browsing. Naturally, those were tests that would always make IE9 look better, but it’s still a very interesting development… the big question now is whether or not other browsers will start to emerge with hardware acceleration.


TEST DRIVE IE9:


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