Microsoft reveals first Internet Explorer 9 details

[Jos]

Speaking at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference today, Steven Sinofsky, president of the company's Windows and Windows Live division, has officially announced plans for the next version of IE: Internet Explorer 9. The new browser is still very early in the development process, with work beginning just three weeks ago, but early builds are already showing smoother rendering and improved performance.

To accomplish this Internet Explorer 9 will shift text and graphics rendering to the graphics chip. Sinofsky showed a few examples, including one where Bing Maps got around 14 FPS without hardware graphics acceleration, and up to 60 FPS once the feature was switched on. The technology uses DirectX's Direct2D application programming interface to boost CSS, DHTML and JavaScript performance.

A new JavaScript engine will also be built into Internet Explorer 9, as well as improved interoperability and standards support -- including HTML 5 and CSS3. No estimates were given on a launch date, but considering IE8 was released just last March, it could still be a while. In the meantime, Microsoft's Channel 9 team has posted three demo videos which you can check out after the break. (Silverlight required)

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https://www.techspot.com/news/37012-microsoft-reveals-first-internet-explorer-9-details.html

 

[Puiu]

If they started working on it just 3 weeks ago then we might not even see it in 2010 (a beta maybe?). But i liked the idea of using hardware acceleration.

BTW is it just me or lately everything's been moving from CPU to GPU? At the rate GPU's and related software are evolving we'll soon have supercomputers in our homes.

 

[ET3D]

We already have supercomputers in our homes. Go some tens of years back, and people would have killed for what we have now.

And yes, it looks like things are moving to the GPU, which is why the trend of CPU+GPU on the same chip makes sense.

 

[Timonius]

Comparatively speaking we'll never see 'supercomputers' in our homes. We may not see the performance of a Jaguar Cray XT5-HE Opteron Six Core 2.6 GHz in our homes for quite some time. Eventually we will but then there will something better out in the supercomputer realm.

 

[yukka]

Will this be a lightweight super fast browser from microsoft or a new even slower browser unless you are running sli