Internet Explorer 9 will support GPU acceleration?

The final battle for the Microsoft browser?

Lot of water has flown though Hudson since the infamous tale of how Microsoft crushed Netscape with Internet Explorer which many criticized as unethical. Now almost 15 years later, IE is facing a similar future, only it has nothing to do with any forced marketing strategy. Firefox and Chrome have gone far ahead by good innovations and better user experience.

Now as IE8 is out, lot of people speculate how the next move of Microsoft will be. Will they even offer a resistance? Mind you IE7 and IE8 offer lot of improvements over the respective previous versions, like IE7 has introduced the tabs, and IE8 brings in the site suggestions, and accelerator etc., but they are generally already old by the time IE implements them.

Now IE9 gears up for another fight-back. Microsoft also knows this time it has to be major, otherwise there may be no respite from the fact that IE is going into oblivion. I think they took this to heart, because looks like IE9 is ready to rock. The software giant has been giving developers and curious journalists a very early peek into its IE 9 progress at PDC, with its stated ambitions including faster Javascript (see table above), HTML5 support, and hardware acceleration for web content – as reported by Engadget. DirectX will use the graphics processor to improve browser text readability and video performance, at the same time taking the memory load off the CPU.

Is this also a move to counter Flash? Do you see a pattern and strategy to support Silverlight? Flash 10.1 came out recently which also supports GPU acceleration. Does it mean when you use IE9 when it comes out, you won’t need Flash because Microsoft’s native product is there to see through you – Silverlight? It will also support HTML5, which supports embedding videos in the browser. But in this field, as someone said, Adobe has always been the 9-feet giant, and most definitely will be. Flash runs in more than 80% of the computers. Some of the world’s most popular streaming video sites like Youtube and Hulu run on Flash, so it’ll be near impossible for MS to replace flash with Silverlight.  

But if MS is thinking not to counter anyone, but keep own quality at par with the market – IE9 should bring a fresh lease of air that Windows 7 seems to be delivering. It’s still in the early developing stage.