Filed under: Internet, Microsoft, Browsers
IE9 unveiled. Faster, more standards-compliant -- DirectX accelerated!
Their goals with IE9 seem pretty obvious from the graphs shown in their presentation: faster, more standards-compliant website rendering. If you look at the slide above, lower is faster. And that's just three weeks into their development of a new browser and web rendering engine!
They're also including 'hardware accelerated' rendering using your graphics card using the DirectX D2D technology. Whether you're trying to perform funky stuff with CSS3, Javascript or DHTML, IE9 should render things a lot faster.
There's a big video (that requires Silverlight!) after the break. It explains and impressively-demonstrates the new DirectX D2D speed-up.
[via GeekSmack]
I don't know if this is a labor of love or merely the brainchild of four very gifted games designers, but Level Up is a really weird mash-up of gaming elements that you have probably never seen in a Flash game before.
Let's start with the premise itself: Groundhog Day meets Memento. The game experience revolves around 'days': you explore the world and the clock slowly ticks towards the evening. You bounce around picking up gems and talking to the denizens of 'Level Upland'. Eventually you feel tired and head back to ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
KeegdnaB said 2:09PM on 11-18-2009
Standards-compliant IE?
There is a cold wind in the air
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Sebastian Anthony said 2:20PM on 11-18-2009
No no, 'more standards-compliant' -- a small step in the right direction...!
Yonatan said 6:10PM on 11-18-2009
What better way to celebrate a new faster, more standards-compliant browser than to greet the user with a SilverLight (TM) installation dialogue?
216 said 2:18PM on 11-18-2009
So its faster? Big whoop, wannafightaboutit?
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Sebastian Anthony said 2:20PM on 11-18-2009
Apple fanboy.
Roberto said 2:21PM on 11-18-2009
hhahahaha, let's wait and see if they actually deliver. it will be very difficult for Microsoft to compete with the features and flexibility that Mozilla Firefox has since it launched, and what Google Chrome is doing right now, with the Extensions coming very soon.
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Matt S. said 8:28AM on 11-19-2009
Well considering IE9 will be the only browser to have hardware accelerated rendering.. I think IE9 will beable to compete just fine especially since the speed of IE9's JS engine with only 3 weeks of work on it is in line with Firefox 3.6beta. Couple that with the HTML5 and CSS3 additions. IE9 will be a competitor again..
hmm said 9:40AM on 11-19-2009
Opera started work on hardware acceleration in 2008.
http://my.opera.com/core/archive/monthly/?month=200806
See the video of Opera running fully hardware accelerated on that site.
blackronin357 said 12:04AM on 11-19-2009
Its kinda fishy I don't see Opera Browser up there! Yeah, I'm fanboy when it comes to them, cuz they have so many old innovations that are now standard on all the other browsers implementing them today.
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Sgt Zeppelin said 2:34PM on 11-18-2009
I can't decide whether I should be impressed by the gains they've made in 3 weeks, or mad because it just shows what kind of a browser they're coming from. I would be great if Microsoft can put out a competitive browser this time around. (Oh, and adblock please!)
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RG said 2:49PM on 11-18-2009
Frankly if the improvement is anywhere near compared to IE6-->IE7-->IE8 then IE9 will be excellent.
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N900 said 2:54PM on 11-18-2009
IE9. Sounds badass.
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Generic said 2:59PM on 11-18-2009
Microsoft kept boasting about how fast IE8 was but the graph tells a different story.
Long live Firefox.
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sRc said 5:29PM on 11-18-2009
well look at IE8 compared to IE7 in that graph. it is loads faster compared to the last iteration, but the other major browsers dropped there speed a good amount too so it still ended up the slowest by a fair amount
Diddle said 6:27PM on 11-21-2009
IE9: We may be faster, but we're still the slowest.
Josh said 3:01PM on 11-18-2009
For people that don't want to download Silverlight, this should be the link: http://ecn.channel9.msdn.com/o9/ch9/1/7/8/5/0/5/IE9D2D_ch9.wmv (though it's not working for me)
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The_Steven said 3:16PM on 11-18-2009
And next, the weather report for Hell.....
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James said 4:38PM on 11-18-2009
I'm hopeful that they'll really improve it, for real this time. I'm hopeful after seeing Windows 7 & Microsoft Security Essentials
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Anthony said 5:15PM on 11-18-2009
Ok, Microsoft... how 'bout you ditch the Trident rendering engine or at least include WebKit?
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kara said 8:59PM on 11-18-2009
I think people also forget about opera and what not which has a nice system. I think IE does need to start working with the standers and stop forcing developers to write the javascript and CSS twice because of IE is the ONLY browser that wants to not follow standers
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