IE9 to be GPU-accelerated

I guess they missed the fact (in their claim to be the first to have GPU-accelerated graphics) that Safari (and any modern Mac application) has been GPU-accelerated since about 10 years ago (moving more and more into the GPU with Core Graphics over that time).

I have been experimenting with GPU accelerating computations from Javascript using WebGL. It is pretty bleeding edge but I've succeeded in speeding up matrix multiply. Here is a link for anyone interested: <a href="http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?p=1828" rel="nofollow">http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?p=1828</a>

I'm happy to read the flight simulator easter egg will finally be playable.

I don't understand why they need hardware acceleration just to reach almost-par with the existing browsers.<p>Also, no UI work whatsoever in tech preview. One would hope they realize their competition is lightyears ahead of them UI wise.

Will it work with Remote Desktop (Microsoft Windows one)? It will with VNC, and stuff based around VNC, but VNC captures the whole screen, while RDC relies somehow on the driver and it's more optimal.<p>The problem with RDC is that it fully replaces the graphics driver, making any GPU accelerated stuff to disappear.<p>Also how it would work with people which machines have been locked after 15 minutes?

Honest question: Is rendering really a bottleneck in a browser? It seems to me that the overhead of one or two HTTP handshakes would surely out-weigh any performance benefit in the rendering code?

The only difference between this and, say, O3D:<p>a) it's not a browser plugin b) it's ambiguous whether or not it will be compatible with the working WebGL spec (I'm guessing not)

I'm had no idea what IExplorer 9 is about ... and what's interesting to me is that they are adding HTML 5 support.<p>And they are supporting SVG too?

Let the hyping of semi-vaporware commence!<p>Haven't we learned anything at all from the W95 -&#62; Chicago -&#62; Memphis -&#62; Cairo -&#62; Windows 2000 -&#62; Windows XP -&#62; Longhorn -&#62; Vista -&#62; Windows 7 replacement hype cycles? Oh, sure: That'll be fixed in X, for sufficiently far away versions of X.<p>NT was the "first OS with a merged file system and heap cache" or some such, when Solaris and others had the same thing for years. Even the hype terms get appropriated from elsewhere.

I see Microsoft is piling up every buzzword available on top of IE9.<p>After you watch them for a couple decades, they become amazingly predictable.