IE9... Will It Suck?

[Dark Jaguar]

Does it actually do anything, though?

If you actually have a GPU, yes. The entire point of the big hardware acceleration fuss is that, for all this time, the CPU and the CPU alone has been processing EVERYTHING you do online. Why does a great modern 2D game render so much faster than an HTML5 page with some decent use of graphical effects? Well, because up until now no browsers were taking advantage of graphics processing to process web graphics. That includes the Flash plugin. As of now, MS has stepped down from "most insecure" company after a massive internal turn-around to focus on it, and Adobe has replaced it. Aside from adobe's flash plugin being the most common attack vector in modern browsers these days, it's choppy animation in even the simplest games can be attributed to a total lack of hardware acceleration. The most recent version adds hardware acceleration to video decompression, but that's the extent of it so far. My point is, HTML5 is poised to replace flash entirely, and one of the big advantages will be that it will run far faster than flash code. IE7 and IE8 were steps in the right direction of modern web standards, but it's IE9 where their efforts are actually on a competing level with the big dogs. As more and more sites take advantage of HTML5 features, I've been forced to make the switch myself. Remember I never bothered adapting to a new browser because for a long time my concern was "I just want web sites to work right". Well, it's long since been past the time when not using IE meant a lot of sites I visited were broken. Chrome and Firefox are interesting. There's some small UI issues that annoy me adapting to them, but there's other things that are nice, however it's mainly due to the fact that IE9 will NOT support XP. Granted, XP is outdated too. I intend on updating to 7 at the first opportunity where it's affordable to me (and adding yet another entry to my expanding boot list of OSes), but by then I may well be used to one or the other of these two competing browsers. I still see Chrome as more or less pointless sometimes though. It doesn't even have a working bookmark menu. For a browser that goes on and on about "saving vertical space to show the page", the virtual requirement of using that most annoying of modern browser fads, the "bookmark bar", is a big complaint to me. I want my bookmarks ONLY when I intend to use one, and then to roll away, not constantly on my screen.

At any rate, the times are a'changin'. I think at some point ABF may even upgrade his screen resolution.