At a recent Professional Developers Conference some details began to emerge about the status of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9). One of the things that is on the planning board is that there will be a performance boost.
The performance gains are expected to be in JavaScript pages. Some preliminary tests have shown a performance increase of 4 times using the Acid3 benchmark tests.
The Acid3 test measures some browser performance characteristics. It is not a hardware benchmark. Nor is it intended to make any comparisons or judgments about the performance of any hardware used. What does Acid3 test? The main part of test is automated through JavaScript, and it produces a test harness that runs 100 subtests. There is a second test called rendering such as text shadow, down loadable fonts, and display: inline-block. And the final test is the smoothness criterion,which is a speed test.
Internet Explorer 8 has an Acid3 rating of 8, so a rating of 32 for the latest build of IE9 looks good, until you compare it to Opera which scores a 90 out of 100; and Firefox gets a rating of 97 out of 100.
IE9 is expected to work closely with PC hardware to deliver performance gains. This is due in part to the rendering engine which will move processing to the machine’s graphics chip. IE9 will switch the Trident rendering engine from running on the GDI to a hardware-accelerated DirectX. It is expected to be the first browser to use hardware acceleration to process and deliver all kinds of images, videos and text. GDI is short for The Graphics Device Interface. It is a Microsoft Windows API, application programming interface, as well at a core operating system component. Graphical objects and the process of transmitting them to output devices such as monitors and printers is the performance role of GDI.
What else can one expect form IE9? Rounded edges on text boxes and support of HTML 5. Plus, there is the expected two-year browser roll-out, so the full release should appear in 2011.
