Winextra – Is hardware acceleration the next browser battleground?

At this point much of the talking abouts about browser speed at displaying pages has to do with how fast they can each individually display javascript. It is a battle of milliseconds which for the most part these days means a metric that most average browser users won’t notice.

However with the recent launch of Safari 5 and the upcoming Internet Explorer 9 it looks like the speed battle will be heading to a new ground – hardware acceleration. what this means to the general layperson using a browser is that things like javascript compiling is designed to make use of your multi-core systems and graphics display are handed off to your computer’s graphics processing unit (GPU). By doing these two things the Internet Explorer team believes that they can create a faster and better browser experience.

To this help show off this technology Microsoft has opened up a Test Drive site for Internet Explorer 9 in an effort to keep the browser front and center in people’s minds.

Part of this effort as well has been the posting of a video comparing the new Safari 5 with hardware acceleration and the still in development Internet Explorer. This is one of those videos and as Brandon LeBlanc points out in his post on the video – watch the Frames Per Second (FPS) counter.