14 DAY TRIAL // There are just a few days left until Microsoft will launch Internet Explorer 9 Beta, with the Beauty of the Web event on September 15th getting closer and closer, and the company notes that it is welcoming the competition from rival browsers in terms of hardware acceleration, but that IE9 is best in breed in this regard. Hardware acceleration involves leveraging the computer’s GPU (graphics processing unit) in concert with DirectX APIs in order to enhance graphics performance for all webpage content.
Ted Johnson, Program Manager Lead for Web Graphics notes that while Internet Explorer 9 offers full hardware acceleration, the other browsers support it only partially, and as such are bound to deliver an inferior performance to users.
Until the fourth Platform Preview of IE9, Microsoft had enabled hardware acceleration by default, and applied it to a wide variety of elements on a webpage, from text, to images, backgrounds, borders, SVG content, HTML5 video and audio, but also HTML5 canvas.
Johnson noted that there are three steps in page rendering in IE9:
“Content Rendering. IE9 accelerates the first phase, Content Rendering, using Windows’ Direct2D and DirectWrite subsystems.
As shown back in November, the results here include much smoother text and vector graphics. Accelerating this phase using the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) improves the display performance of the most common HTML elements: text, images, backgrounds, and borders.
Page Composition. IE9 uses Direct3D for the next phase, Page Composition, giving IE awesome performance in image-intensive scenarios (like Flying Images and FishIE Tank).
Accelerating this phase takes advantage of one of the GPU’s most significant features: the ability to draw bitmap images at very high speed. Moreover, because the GPU’s private memory retains images, redraw of pages heavy in images is very fast.
Desktop Composition. After a browser renders content and composes pages, Windows Vista and Windows 7 use the GPU to compose the final screen display via the Desktop Window Manager (DWM).
Because IE9 uses DirectX and only DirectX, there is better interaction between IE9 and the DWM, using less GPU memory and resulting in better stability than browsers that mix different subsystems."
Johnson notes that based on the info other browser vendors shared, hardware acceleration for their browsers is limited to either content rendering or page composition, but not both.
He adds, that the difference between partial and full hardware acceleration is visible in some of the tests available on the IE Test Drive Site, in which rival browsers underperform in comparison to Internet Explorer 9.
Although Johnson did not point fingers to any specific browsers, Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler disputed the claims that Firefox 4.0 doesn’t offer full hardware acceleration.
“The facts are that Firefox takes advantage of the same Windows 7 APIs that Microsoft does to accelerate both the compositing and the rendering of Web content and that Mozilla provided test builds of Firefox, (…) with this hardware acceleration well before Microsoft did,” he stated.
“We are faster and we were first,” Dotzler added in response to Microsoft’s words.
But fact is that Mozilla only recently, with the advent of Firefox 4.0 Beta 5, turned on hardware acceleration by default for the next iteration of the open source browser.
At the same time, Mozilla still has work to do in terms of hardware acceleration, and uses a different architecture from Microsoft, one that the Redmond company notes will impair performance.
Mozilla’s Robert O'Callahan opined that not only will the architecture used for Firefox 4.0 will not deliver inferior speed in comparison to IE9, but that Firefox 4.0 will also support hardware acceleration for Windows XP, which the next major version of Firefox doesn’t do.
“We’re excited that other browsers are starting to optimize for the Windows platform,” Johnson added.
“Taking advantage of the PC’s hardware through the Windows APIs makes browsing on Windows better than browsing on other systems. Since that first demo last November, other browser vendors have begun to work on hardware accelerated rendering using the DirectX family of Windows APIs".
“Hardware acceleration is an important part of delivering great HTML5 performance. Keep in mind that not all hardware acceleration is equal. Today, IE9 is the first and only browser to deliver full hardware acceleration of all HTML5 content.”
Pease remember, in September 15th, I will be attending the Beauty of the Web IE9 Beta launch event in San Francisco. I expect to get some face time with members of the IE team, in addition to other participants.
So I thought I’d offer you the chance to send over your IE9-related questions to me, and I’ll make sure to pass them on to the people behind Internet Explorer 9.
You can leave a comment below, or use the email address at the bottom of this article. I can also be contacted on Twitter.
Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Platform Preview 4 is available for download here.