During the last couple of years Microsoft has seen the number of Internet Explorer users drop more and more in favour of other browsers. With the new Internet Explorer 9, which is in full development, Microsoft hopes to change the current trend. At MIX2010 the software giant confirmed that Internet Explorer 9 will not support Windows XP in favour of GPU accelerated web browsing. Something that we’re hoping to see a lot more of in the future.
Microsoft is also putting a great deal of work in HTML5 functionality such as high resolution video playback using the h.264 format aimed to replace today’s Flash-based solutions, integrated sound on webpages, scalable vector graphics and last, but not least, CSS3.
The JavaScript engine has been replaced with a new Webkit-based engine which should be able to keep up, if not be faster, that its competitors. The engine’s name is Chakra and it utilizes separate background threads to compile JavaScript content, something that’s supposed to be very efficient with today’s multi-core CPUs.
But Microsoft doesn’t settle there. Going past the scope of our CPUs and focusing on using the processing power of our GPUs. By locking out Windows XP users and using Direct2D and DirectWrite to render webcontent, there should be a pretty nice performance increase when zooming and moving webcontent such as pictures.
More information about Internet Explorer 9 can be found at Microsoft’s homepage. There’s even a test platform available for download, where the user can try the application and some of the HTML5 functionality as well as some GPU accelerated functionality.
A HTML5 application where the user can create its own t-shirts
