In case you missed it, earlier this week Mozilla announced that Firefox 4 (beta 5) will include hardware acceleration, mostly likely to combat the announcement in a few days regarding Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9, which will also have hardware acceleration.

So, which is better? If you read the msdn blog, you’ll find out that Microsoft believes it has the superior browser technology because they use “full hardware acceleration” as opposed to “partial hardware acceleration. In their own words.

With IE9, developers have a fully-hardware accelerated display pipeline that runs from their markup to the screen. Based on their blog posts, the hardware-accelerated implementations of other browsers generally accelerate one phase or the other, but not yet both. Delivering full hardware acceleration, on by default, is an architectural undertaking. When there is a desire to run across multiple platforms, developers introduce abstraction layers and inevitably make tradeoffs which ultimately impact performance and reduce the ability of a browser to achieve ‘native’ performance. Getting the full value of the GPU is extremely challenging and writing to intermediate layers and libraries instead of an operating system’s native support makes it even harder. Windows’ DirectX long legacy of powering of the most intensive 3D games has made DirectX the highest performance GPU-based rendering system available.

When you run other browsers that support hardware acceleration, you’ll notice that the performance on some of the examples from the IE Test Drive site is comparable to IE9 yet performance on other examples isn’t. The differences reflect the gap between full and partial hardware acceleration. As IE supports new, emerging Web standards, those implementations will also be fully hardware accelerated.

Hardware acceleration of HTML5 video is a great example. At MIX10, we showed the advantage of using hardware for video. In March, IE9 played two HD-encoded, 720p videos on a netbook using very little of the CPU while another browser maxed out the CPU while dropping frames playing only one of the videos. Because of full hardware acceleration of the entire pipeline, you experience great performance playing these videos while moving them around the page and styling and compositing them with opacity, using web standard markup.

I’ll leave the technical jargon up to you to decide, but it is worth noting that Firefox has had hardware acceleration since last year. That being said, they have yet to incorporate “full hardware acceleration” to date. Firefox Beta 4 included acceleration, while beta 5 had it turned on by default as long as you were on a computer running DX10 or greater.

In the race to produce the latest and greatest browser, it will be the browser that brings the most to the table in a fast and secure way. A decent user interface doesn’t hurt either.

Source:-http://www.windows7news.com/2010/09/10/ie9-full-hardware-acceleration/

Apple TV and Google TV are not the only two in the race to bring media to your living room. An anonymous user has tipped us off to some exiting changes in the latest private beta build of Boxee including hardware acceleration and offline mode. Boxee is the first “social” media center, whose free, open source, downloadable software is changing the way consumers experience media. For the full list and a video introduction to Boxee read on . Not familiar with Boxee.

Boxee is the first “social” media center, whose free, open source, downloadable software is changingthe way consumers experience media.On a computer or connected to an HDTV, Boxee gives people a truly connected digital entertainment

experience to enjoy movies, TV shows, music and photos, as well as streaming content from websiteslike Netflix, MLB.TV, Comedy Central, Pandora, Last.fm, and flickr. Not only that, but you can share

information about what you’re watching with friends so they can find it legally and enjoy it too.You can even post things you like to social networks like Twitter, Last.FM, or Tumblr. All this fromwithin a visually driven interface that makes media come to life.

Source:-http://www.berryscoop.com/2010/06/boxee-private-beta/

Yesterday, Apple released the latest version of its web browser, Safari 5. In their release notes, they highlight not only new features, but also the fact that it’s faster than the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox. One competitor they didn’t mention was the most-used web browser in the world: Internet Explorer. Today, Microsoft has responded to that.

In a post on their Blogging Windows blog, the IE team has posted a video showing the latest version of IE, IE9 (still in beta testing), running against Safari 5. The result? IE smokes Safari. It’s not even close.

So case-closed? No quite. In the post, Microsoft doesn’t directly mention it but this is showcasing IE9′s use of hardware acceleration vs. Safari’s use. In its release yesterday, Apple was talking about pure JavaScript performance tests, which are different (and again, didn’t mention Microsoft — though judging from their own posted results, Safari 5 would win pretty easily). In other words, for web apps in the future that rely heavily on hardware acceleration (such as games), IE clearly has a leg up right now (at least on Windows machines). But for web apps that are JavaScript heavy (such as Gmail), Safari likely does.

But Apple does highlight hardware acceleration for Windows as a key new feature of Safari:

Tap into the graphics processing power of your PC while browsing the web. Safari 5 adds hardware acceleration support for Windows, so rich media and interactive graphics execute smoothly and speedily in the browser.

I also ran some of the IE9 Test Drive speed demos on the latest release of Chrome (6.0+), and IE9′s results killed it as well (about 60 FPS vs. 6 FPS). But again, as these demos note, they “full advantage of your hardware with background compiled JavaScript.”

source:-http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/08/ie9-safari-5/