Firefox lead dev: Microsofts IE9 marketing claims "nonsense"

Mozilla and Microsoft have been major players and arch rivals in the web browser market for several years now, and with all new versions of their software now being released the rivalry is once again heating up.

Microsoft just launched Internet Explorer 9, a major overhaul from the browser’s predecessors which is being heavily marketed with claims to offer a faster and more secure internet experience. But one Mozilla Firefox developer is speaking out and asserting that Microsoft’s marketing isn’t being honest about IE9’s hardware acceleration capabilities, a browser design that passes processor-intensive tasks to the computer’s GPU (graphics processing unit) for loading and rendering web page animations more quickly.

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“Internet Explorer 9 fully hardware-accelerates the entire Web platform,” begins a recent blog post by IE program manager Seth McLaughlin on MSDN.com. “Different browsers take different approaches to hardware acceleration. These differences result in different levels of performance. Today we look at Santa’s Workshop, one of the entertaining Test Drive demos we released during the holiday season, and see how the different approaches to hardware acceleration benefit consumers and developers.”

McLaughlin’s post goes into great detail comparing the performance of the demo across the most current versions of IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari web browsers, touting the fact that Microsoft’s use of “full hardware acceleration” allows IE9 to outperform all others.

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But long-time Firefox developer Robert O'Callahan doesn’t believe that McLaughlin’s post is accurate.

“’Full Hardware Acceleration is the Difference’ ... well, no it isn't,” begins O’Callahan’s comment on the MSDN IE blog. “I just did some profiling of Firefox and we spend less than 8% of the time painting. Almost all the time is in the DOM manipulation of transform attributes, so we must be doing something stupid there, which we'll have to fix. Nothing to do with ‘hardware acceleration’ though.”

O’Callahan then posted on his own blog in greater detail why he disagrees with McLaughlin’s claims.

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“A browser that "fully hardware-accelerates the entire Web platform" shouldn't have any trouble with a simple HTML scrolling test case, should it? Try this test case in the browsers on your machine,” O’Callahan challenges his. Running full screen on my laptop, IE9 RC1 takes more than ten times as long as Firefox 4. That doesn't seem very accelerated to me. View the source to see that the test case does nothing tricky.”

“I can't say for sure what IE9 is doing in this case, but experimentation suggests that it simply repaints the entire page from scratch every time it scrolls the above test case,” he continued. “This does not make best use of the hardware.”

O’Callahan created another post the following day that goes into greater depth regarding performance differences between Firefox 4 and IE9.

So who has the better new browser? To be honest, I haven’t given IE9 a shot yet, but from what I’ve seen, both browsers seem to have come a long way since the last revisions. These companies always seem to find a way to show that their own browser is somehow better, but you don’t know for sure unless you give both a chance by testing each with the tasks that you perform on a day-to-day basis.

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