Microsoft  told its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles Wednesday that it's already working on the next version of Internet Explorer. In addition to demonstrating some of the progress on performance and interoperability standards in IE9, Microsoft said it intends to make more PC hardware capabilities available to web developers from within the browser.
"Specifically, we demonstrated hardware-accelerated rendering of all graphics and text in web pages, something that other browsers don't do today," said Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch.
JavaScript Engine Optimization
IE8 has been criticized for running significantly behind rival browsers in industry tests such as Sunspider and Acid3. However, browser performance is "a super-complex problem" because different sites -- and even different activities within the same site -- can place varying loads and demands on the many different subsystems within the browser, Hachamovitch said.
"As we continue to improve support in IE for technologies that site developers use, IE9's Acid3 score will continue to go up," Hachamovitch said. However, Microsoft's ultimate goal "is to deliver better performance across the board for real-world sites, not just benchmarks," he added.
According to members of the company's browser development team, the performance of the JavaScript engine that will ship with IE9 is already on par with the numbers being delivered by the latest Mozilla Firefox beta. They also claim to be making progress in helping IE9 catch up to the red-hot performance delivered by Google Chrome's latest V8 engine.
"We've been working on a bunch of performance optimizations centered on the JavaScript engine," said IE9 team member John Montgomery. "One of the things we've heard very clearly from customers is that we need to get better there."
Microsoft also intends to help web developers by changing IE so they can use the DirectX family of Windows APIs. "The starting point is moving all graphics and text rendering from the CPU to the graphics card using Direct2D and DirectWrite," Hachamovitch said. "Graphics hardware acceleration means that rich, graphically intensive sites can render faster while using less CPU."
Yet another team focus is on making the PC platform and ecosystem around Windows deliver amazing hardware innovation, Hachamovitch noted. "The browser should be a place where the benefits of that hardware innovation shine through for web developers," he said. (continued...)
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