Gadgetory

I mean a freed with cnet news here in Los Angeles at Microsoft's professional developer conference where one of the topics is internet explorer 9 with me as d nakama vet who is the general manager for an internet explorer so what's Microsoft thinking as far as I a 9 well today we gave developers a first look at some of the progress that we're making in high nine we showed three things in particular we showed some progress on performance we showed progress on interoperable standards and we showed hardware accelerated graphics and text briefly on the performance front we talked about all the different subsystems that are in the browser and how different sites have got different profiles in terms of how they exercise the browser and we were we were specific around some of the progress we've made on one of those sub systems particularly JavaScript performance and that's an area where Microsoft had come under some criticism some of the other browsers had been a little faster considerably faster right and that's as I said one specific subsystem we showed some progress you can see some detailed charts and commentaries at blogs msdn calm / ie where we go into detail about the performance progress we need we showed some progress around interoperable standards you can see that our asset three test score has gone up in the three weeks since windows 7 general availability and more importantly you can see how ie9 supports other standards in richer way standards that that developers rely on to build very rich websites for example we showed some improvements around selectors or we showed improvements around rounded corners and borders the thing that ena and I spent the most time talking about was actually the hardware accelerated graphics and text and just to make sense of what what's going on here we're moving ie from sitting on top of GDI which is the old graphics infrastructure of Windows 22 moving and working on top of Direct X and the powerful amazing thing about Direct X is that it taps into the hardware and so if you have a great graphics card and a great GPU DirectX let's Windows programs take advantage of that so what you see in ie9 what we demonstrated and you can find links to great videos is how directx gives much clearer and smoother text in the browser and how directx gives amazing graphics rendering and performance inside of the browser and we have a few examples here and I really hope the flip video captures it and if it doesn't I'll make sure you get a link to the to the screen captures so this is an example of text so we're going to start down over here and you'll see that as I increase the letter spacing I go through you'll see that it kind of chunks forward chunk by chunk by chunk and that's using the standard just using GDI and now I'm going to do that again and I'm going to do that with d2d and you'll see it's a much smoother experience almost like you'd expect out of an animated movie or an xbox game let me give another example of how text comes in here we are in GDI and as the fonts animate in there's a lot of left-right wiggle as it comes in and it comes in at a pretty slow speed when I do that again on top of d 2 d it's a lot smoother and just for the viewers I want to say it is a lot smoother my hands still shaking just as much so it might not be as obvious but basically the idea here is that graphics and text are much sharper and I think give one more that you show with bing maps where right you get a lot better frame rate because of this yeah and so let's let's go to the Bing Maps example and I'm going to bring up a couple of interesting tools here there we go here is something that will show frame rate you'll see frames per second there and I'm going to start scrolling i'm going to start panning this is just a plain old ajax site you'll see i'm getting about seven frames per second it will vary between five and ten and when i flip over in 2d 2d you'll see the frame rate will go way up here to about 40 or so typically eight we can get well over 60 frames a second and you'll also notice it's not in the video right now but down in the corner there's a cpu meter down here and you'll see that the cpu meter goes from being the cpu goes from very high utilization when using GDI to being just about nothing under D to D so these are just some of the early things we're seeing with Internet Explorer 9 obviously it's not ready you've just been working on a short time it's early in the development cycle we thought it was important to show some of the progress we've made with the development community there's a blog detailing this and we're excited for feedback and more conversation about this thanks team thanks