Internet Explorer 9 – Some Preliminary News

GGarza | Nov 27, 2009 | Comments

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At a recent Professional Developers Conference some details began to emerge about the status of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9).  One of the things that is on the planning board is that there will be a performance boost.

The performance gains are expected to be in JavaScript pages. Some preliminary tests have shown a performance increase of 4 times using the Acid3 benchmark tests.

The Acid3 test measures some browser performance characteristics. It is not a hardware benchmark. Nor is it  intended to make any comparisons or judgments about the performance of any hardware used. What does Acid3 test? The main part of test is automated through JavaScript, and it produces a test harness that runs 100 subtests. There is a second test called rendering such as text shadow, down loadable fonts, and display: inline-block. And the final test is the smoothness criterion,which is a speed test.

Internet Explorer 8 has an Acid3 rating of 8, so a rating of 32 for the latest build of IE9 looks good, until you compare it to Opera which scores a 90 out of 100; and Firefox gets a rating of 97 out of 100.

IE9 is expected to work closely with PC hardware to deliver performance gains. This is due in part to the rendering engine which will move processing to the machine’s graphics chip. IE9 will switch the Trident rendering engine from running on the GDI to a hardware-accelerated DirectX. It is expected to be the first browser to use hardware acceleration to process and deliver all kinds of images, videos and text. GDI is short for The Graphics Device Interface. It is a Microsoft Windows API, application programming interface, as well at a core operating system component. Graphical objects and the process of transmitting them to output devices such as monitors and printers is the performance role of GDI.

What else can one expect form IE9? Rounded edges on text boxes and support of HTML 5. Plus, there is the expected two-year browser roll-out, so the full release should appear in 2011.

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About the Author: I've been in the computer industry since the mid 80's. I have several Microsoft Certifications including MCSE 2003, MCTS, MCITP, and Cisco CCNA, and CCNP. I also have a Msc in Computer Information Systems from the University of Liverpool. I am the author of the Tiger Guide to Laptops. My interests are in Astronomy, Evolutionary Science, American and European History, Finance and Economics, and Computer Science. You can follow me on twitter. http://twitter.com/GigaAstroTech

  • nk
    FYI Opera scores 100/100
  • lolurcomment
    lawl @ opera
  • Admin_RobertCity
    I expect IE 9 to either be a success with IE users, or a horrible failure that makes everyone switch to Firefox.
  • Webkit-based browsers also score 100, and have for quite some time. Webkit + a fast Javascript engine make IE and Mozilla feel so slooooooowwwww. I don't know why people tolerate it.
  • Randomly Curious
    Well Firefox - most people use it for adblock, theme change and other extensions that still aren't implemented to Chrome or Opera,Safari with easy configuration.
    Would see great speed with 100% GPU accelerate on IE :P ! Will other browsers have access to Microsoft Windows API*** - this is better than OpenGL?
  • Re. Firefox: It's sad that people value their comfort more than they prize performance and standards compliance if ad blocking is the primary motivation for using Firefox.

    OS X has OpenCL as of 10.6, so all a developer needs to do to dump CPU intensive bits of their code to the GPU is write those segments of their software in OpenCL. I imagine this will be showing up on most of the Webkit based browsers soon, if there is actually a benefit to doing so.
  • Bill Williams
    Let's hope Microsoft will finally listen to its users and give us a browser that complies to web standards, supports SVG, passes Acid3 and supports APNGs.
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