Ad Libitum

Yesterday Steven Sinofsky spoke about the upcoming Internet Explorer 9 at Microsoft PDC (Professional Developers Conference). Since Internet Explorer 8 was released in March of this year, we are not to expect it as soon as we would like to see it, but internal builds are already present, so maybe the later half of 2010.

The biggest, at least to me, bombshell is that they are planning on passing on the rendering to the graphics chip, using DirectX Direct 2D. At PDC I guess they showed an early build doing a rendering with and without the help of the GPU, and the difference was that with the GPU it ran 4+ times faster. This is a good improvement, however it will further stress the GPU, and, in many cases, the general performance of computers. A lot of, especially company computers, does not have a separate video card, but uses the built-in GPU that shares the RAM. In that sense, this is NOT an improvement.

What is REALLY good news is that they are planning on a whole new Java Script Engine, not released which one, and standards support including HTML5 and CSS3, so I kind of get my wish list from yesterday. I really wanted a firm announcement on SVG - it will revolutionize the world wide web as we know it.

This is just a short ‘off-the-cuff’ Ad Libitum, I will most likely return to this topic in the next year, when betas and RC’s are starting to come.