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Adblock (kinda) is already there as "Tracking Protection" in IE9.

Been using Ad Muncher, I like it. No it's not free but honestly it's better IMO than Adblock on FF.

and FlashBlock via ActiveX filtering

Edited 2011-04-13 09:52 UTC

Have they got rid of ActiveX? If not it's again irrelevant!

what's wrong with ActiveX?

Both Chrome and Firefox are working on hardware acceleration:

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/08/chrome-7-shows-off-...

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/09/hardware-acceleration/

However MS seems to have a nice headstart, and their implementation performs faster. They also have the advantage to target solely DirectX, while others are multi-plarform.

The whole full vs. partial hardware acceleration debate is mostly bull from Microsoft marketing department.

The people from Chrome haven't released a stable browser with hardware acceleration turned on by default yet.

See how they didn't test with Firefox 4 ? Which uses the exact same API's as IE from Microsoft on the Microsoft Windows platform and similair API's on Windows XP.

I did the test in Firefox 4 and is slow as a snail and it doesn't render the page well.

But was hardware acceleration enabled ?

At this point I haven't even found a piece of hardware at home or at work where acceleration works flawless all the time. That is atleast 10 different hardware configurations.

Not in IE or Firefox or Opera, so I can't even test it.

Usually IE9 just crashes if I try to use it, it also crashes Chrome (not just tabs) or I need to reboot the computer to get a proper working desktop again.

The things that do work and I'm able to test with hardware acceleration enabled IE is faster at some things, Firefox is faster at others. It didn't really matter much.

Usually not with a big difference though.

Edited 2011-04-12 22:33 UTC

I dont't know if HW is on, Im using Firefox 4 as it comes out of the box for Windows 7, I assume it is.

Edited 2011-04-12 22:26 UTC

Go into the Options, on the Advanced tab, and double-check that it's enabled.

I conducted my own tests and hw acceleration in Firefox and Chrome is so slow calling it 'acceleration' is a stretch!

They might be using opengl/directX2/3D to composite layers and whatnot, but how is that useful? A speed increase in redraw of 10% .. oh my .. how about SVG? A little bling and animation and all but IE grinds to a halt.. sad.

I love my new default browser Firefox4, but something needs to happen on their so-called 'acceleration' ..

Most of the cases where Firefox is slower than IE in their demos has been shown to have nothing to do with hardware acceleration. It's nearly always slow javascript or DOM performance in some hotspot in the code that gets called 1000 times a second. For FF5 they added a little patch to cache 1 security check and ended up getting twice the performance of FF4 in some of those demos they were slow in, and there are lots of little performance bugs like that. They even forgot to turn on the profile-guided compilation for FF4, and switching that on bumped javascript performance by 10-15% without changing a line of code.

What IE has done really well is to create a bunch of demos, and then tune their browser around them. They've become the most common place to try out these new features, which means that because they tuned their browser against those tests they usually end up with an advantage. 3rd part tests would be much more fair, but at this point most people are just content to use the tests MS created.

Edited 2011-04-13 01:53 UTC

They also have the advantage to target solely DirectX, while others are multi-plarform.

Advantage? IMNSHO, that depends on viewpoint. If you are joined at the hip to Windows, this might be a boon, but not if you are on a non-MS platform. As long as MS is not going to think multi-platform, IE is not going to be on my radar, no matter how good that browser gets.

They do think multi-platform. As in, XP, Win7, Win8, etc. What other platforms would you have them support? Linux? LOL!

No, they aren't supporting XP.

Meh, I don't like it because it makes some web fonts look screwy.

Flash is already gpu accelerated and is a better platform for game development.

Flash sucks and needs to die.

However, flash cartoons are awesome, and so is Robot Unicorn Attack :p

so we should use patent troll h264 that can't be added to open source browsers instead ?

Opera is working on cross-platform (openGL) hardware acceleration, but it's not available in the stable version yet. There was one webgl-enabled build available for Windows: http://labs.opera.com/news/2011/02/28/

These two articles explain the ridiculousness of IE claiming "full hardware acceleration":

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2011/03/the_myth_of_ful...

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2011/03/investigating_p...

Really, this demonstration is running on Windows ARM ?

http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/12/visualized-ie10-and-windows-runn...

Where can I download a Chrome (and I presume Firefox looking at the tray) build for Windows ARM ?

You can build it yourself, like these guys did:
http://techiser.com/acer-dx241h-packs-arm-cpu-google-chrome-browser...

And you know the worst ?

Flash was a plugin, which you could easily uninstall and disable.

But with HW acceleration and fancy HTML5 stuff in all browsers, bloat is going to become part of the de facto web standards.

Saying HW is bloat for the browser is like saying Compiz is bloat for x.org.

Compiz *is* bloat for X.

I don't consider using the metal to give a better experience in the desktop is bloat, In the contrary, Who would want to use software accelerated desktop these days?, I certainly don't, not even smarphones are willing to.

It's not using the HW that is the bloat. It's the stupid useless eye candy that is the bloat.

Then in your case is in the eye of the beholder.

Useless eye candy is called "polish" ... Seriously my smartphone can render most sites pretty quickly ... if you have a desktop/laptop is struggling ... maybe it is time for a new one.

Edited 2011-04-13 13:13 UTC

It has nothing to do with whether the hardware can render it or not. It reduces the battery life for useless crap that doesn't gain me anything and takes up more memory doing so as well as mostly making the UI look very ugly. I want my smartphone to have as long battery life as possible and this "polish" works against that concept.

Edited 2011-04-15 00:06 UTC

it's not the tech that is bloat, it's what web-devs will do with it that is bloat

just remember when web-devs discovered java-script...

No, WebDevs knew javascript a long time ago, is more like javascript in the browser stopped sucking badly in the recent years and now is safe to leverage its power.

I say that. Why would you need a powerful GPU to smoothly render basic things like windows and web pages ? E17 shows pretty well that you don't need it even if you're fond of crazy animations everywhere. GPUs are for heavy tasks like 1080p video decoding, 3D games, or multimedia creation, that power shouldn't be needed otherwise.

Using the GPU, in itself, is not that bad. But when it's useless, it's unneeded complexity, that's an unneeded source of crashes. And the worst is that it could actually become useful one day (cause you know, if it's there, devs will use it), because that would mean that our desktop and web would have become more bloated by the same order of magnitude than between the first Macintosh's OS and Windows Vista Ultimate.

Edited 2011-04-13 07:01 UTC

I say that. Why would you need a powerful GPU to smoothly render basic things like windows and web pages ? E17 shows pretty well that you don't need it. GPUs are for heavy tasks like 1080p video decoding, 3D games, or multimedia creation, that power shouldn't be needed otherwise. "
A lot of people want to play 3D games in their web browser. No one's saying the Google home page needs acceleration, but doing 3D and animations on the GPU just makes sense. Even if you don't need it, you'll still end up saving power and better utilizing the hardware on lower power devices.

Battery life of my computer with the GPU turned off : 3h10
Battery life of my computer with the GPU turned on and idle : 1h40

Talk about power savings...

Anyway, do you really expect web developers to stay still with their current designs, while browsers offer much more power ? I'd rather say : prepare for the second coming of animated backgrounds and Flash websites. Those who have a powerful computer will see it smoothly and just rant about the reduced battery life, but the others will suffer.

Edited 2011-04-13 07:18 UTC

I thought we were talking about web browsers?

Hey, cheer up. For people like you there is always links: http://www.jikos.cz/~mikulas/links/

The OP mentioned power savings as a benefit of using GPUs in areas where they're not needed.


Have played with it during my Gentoo days, though not voluntarily However, it just doesn't work.
1/Raw text mode has insufficient resolution, it wastes space on things like borders as it can't align on a sub-character boundary.
2/GUI browsers with images and Flash/JS disabled are feasible, in fact I do this with mobile browsers from time to time, when tired of their slowness. However, it doesn't work with many websites, which will assume that you have all of them available, on, and enabled. Like the Flash website without fallback HTML, websites which use JS menus, etc...

Besides, only some mobile devices of today can't render pictures well. But with things like GPUs, the bloat possibilities are endless. Just look at compositing : blurry windows borders, really ?

Just like those with black & white TVs suffered when broadcasting in color became common.
You must realize that the current generation's "bloated" software becomes the next hardware generation's minimum requirements.

Right, instead web browsers should stick to making our desktop supercomputers display web pages and run javascript at the speed of a 486.

There already was an IE 2, it came with NT 4. Let's just call it IE 10

IE8 rendered HTML 4.01 strict by default. IE9 is all about HTML5 and better javascript performance.

Your view of IE is tarded.

In theory...
In practice IE is still a pain in the arse
http://twitter.com/ie9bugs

Oh looks some IE9 bugs.

Good thing Firefox 4 didn't ship with any.
http://quality.mozilla.org/events/2011/03/28/unconfirmed-bug-triage...

Is it cold under the rock you have been lived the last years?

Edited 2011-04-12 21:10 UTC

What I don't understand is why all browsers tend to copy the new kid on the block, ie Chrome.

After Opera deciding that only morons would want pinned tabs to retain their width, not shrink to the favicon and not shift to the left (which behavior we've had for years) and that the best thing to do would be to copy Chrome, now it's Firefox copying its crazily fast-moving version numbering scheme.

FF 3.0 came almost three years before 4.0 and now, there are three major-numbered versions planned for just this year, and that's besides version 4.0 ... wow.

I don't think it's certain that the next 3 releases will be called 5, 6, and 7. They might end up being 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3 for all we know.

Try Opera, it is as good as others free friends. If you can't try IE9 on ur machines.