Google Chrome engineers are making up for Microsoft Internet Explorer's recent gains in hardware-assisted acceleration
Google released Chrome to reignite competitive development of browsers, and now it is playing catch-up on at least one front: hardware-assisted acceleration.
This week, Microsoft will release the first public beta of the IE9 (Internet Explorer version 9) browser. Although Microsoft's new browser features a Chrome-like interface, one of the improvements that Microsoft has touted as putting this release beyond Chrome is IE9's vastly improved performance in rendering graphics, thanks to its offloading some of the work from the CPU to the GPU.
"It is something we've been working on for a while too. Our releases show some pretty good progress there," said Google group product manager Brian Rakowski. But he also admits that the current version of Chrome, version 6, "doesn't do very well" when compared against other browsers doing GPU-assisted rendering of Web pages.
"I think we'll be quite competitive with any of the other browsers with our next release, with a month or two," he said. "If you look at Chrome at one of the beta channels, or even the nightly builds, you will see we have made amazing progress in the last couple of weeks," he said.
At the Microsoft TechEd conference last June, Microsoft senior product manager Pete LePage demonstrated how GPU-based assistance could spin a fancy icon on the screen at 60 frames per second (FPS), while the then-current build of Chrome struggled to rotate the icon at 2 FPS. This simple demonstration pointed the way to the richer graphics that will one day be possible through browsers.
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http://www.infoworld.com/d/applications/ie9-has-google-chrome-the-run-605