Microsoft will finally let us in on its biggest secret, the new Internet Explorer 9, later today. There are high expectations and a tension that focuses on how good this new browser will be. Google, which has dominated the browser speed race so far and, conceivably, leads with Mozilla the browser innovation pace, is already on its toes and is suddenly ramping up its GPU acceleration talk. Mozilla has unexpectedly rescheduled its Firefox 4 Beta 6 for a release date today.
Chrome benchmark data, courtesy of Google
Until the end of August, when Google confirmed in public (developers knew about it since May) that it was working on GPU acceleration, the company did not speak a word about its browser hardware acceleration, which had become a huge topic for IE9 and Firefox. Now there seems to be an urgency to discuss this topic more frequently. Perhaps it is not the best timing to reveal initial success, as IE9 is due as a first Beta today and will feature, according to Microsoft, the most complete hardware acceleration support in the industry.
Realistically, GPU acceleration is not essential to our web browsing experience today – how many websites besides Microsoft’s benchmarks do you know that give such a browser an edge? Today, we may much more benefit from responsiveness, JavaScript speed and a nimble interface, which Chrome has. Tomorrow, however, may focus on GPU acceleration as complex HTML5 websites are emerging and web page content is simply too overwhelming for a multi-core CPU. There is horsepower waiting in your GPU today and it is common sense that it should be used. IE9 and Firefox 4 Beta 5 do that already and offer a comparable performance, even if Microsoft tries to pitch a story that it has done a better job than Mozilla.
Chrome has fallen behind in this game and it is somewhat surprising that it has, as hardware acceleration has been on Chrome’s to-do list for more than a year and we have known since March that IE9 will support this major new feature. There is a good chance that Google’s Chrome team simply overslept this trend or felt that UI changes and JavaScript enhancements are more important.
In a new blog post, the Chrome team says that it has made good progress in recent Canary builds and nightly builds of Chrome 7 (the nightly builds are called Chromium, but I will refer to them as Chrome for the sake of simplicity.) You can activate the GPU acceleration with a switch in the Chrome command line (such as C:\Users\Wolfgang\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome SxS\Application\chrome.exe -enable-accelerated-compositing) and if it works (Chrome tends to be a bit moody) you will see a GPU process in the Chrome Task Manager (which can be found in the Tools menu.) Chrome 6 and the Chrome 7 developer versions do not support this switch yet.
Google group product manager Brian Rakowski told PC World that Chrome 6 isn’t doing a particularly great job in hardware acceleration, but Chrome 7 has made some progress. So far, the acceleration is limited to 2D canvas compositing, which is just one of three components of the entire acceleration process. Google claims that Chrome 7 is up to 60 times faster than Chrome 6 in some of Microsoft’s GPU acceleration tests. That may sound like a lot, but if we remember that Firefox and IE9 are up to 100 times faster in some tests, then we know that Google has a quite a bit of work left to do. Google may call the gains impressive, but, in comparison to Firefox and IE9, they are negligible.
The problem seems to be that Chrome’s Webkit platform does not have all the necessary components for full hardware acceleration and there needs to be extra work being done to reach that goal. Chromium’s graphics code is mainly focused on font rendering and much less on accelerated compositing. But there is no information how Direct 2D and Direct 3D processes are employed. It appears that, despite it is a graphics issue, that content rendering has only limited GPU acceleration support. Compositing is also only in its beginning stages and the desktop compositing component is missing at this time.
Google said it will take a month or two until it will be competitive with IE9 and Firefox and we should see improvements due to the fast Chrome release cycles soon. “Competitive” is, however, not a phrase we hear very often from Google and it appears that the developer teams is very cautious about building up any high expectations into this new feature.
It may not matter in the end and it may be a pure marketing feature for some time, at least until hardware acceleration becomes a true requirement in a much more complex Internet. Google has some time to get the GPU support right, but as of now it is clearly trailing Microsoft and Mozilla. Interestingly enough, however, Google is already building the GPU acceleration feature into its Android browser, while we still have to wait and see how this will work out on Microsoft’s mobile browser side and Mozilla’s Fennec 2, which is based on Firefox 4 and currently scheduled for a September Beta 1 release.
It is not too difficult to predict that much of the browser innovation could shift to the mobile side in 2011.
We also noticed that Mozilla has rescheduled the release date of Firefox 4 Beta 6 for today. Originally, the release date was targeted for September 20. However, this Beta 6 is a newly scheduled “emergency” Beta release and not the feature freeze release, which is now targeted as Beta 7. The Beta 6 released today is an emergency beta release that fixes stability issues on Windows systems as well as some “rendering and keyboard/mouse focus issues on OSX“. Beta 7 will now be the feature freeze release for Firefox 4 and will reveal, for the first time, the entire feature set of the new browser, including GPU acceleration and a new JavaScript engine called JaegerMonkey.
Just in case you want to be among the first to download IE9 Beta, you should be watching beautyoftheweb.com today and expect the download to become available around 12:30 p.m. EDT.
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