Microsoft's upcoming update for its web browser, Internet Explorer 9, puts a lot of focus on support for the HTML 5 standards. IE9 is also expected to beef up performance, offloading tasks within the web browser to the graphics processing unit (GPU), or using separate CPU cores for certain elements of web pages if available.
While still easily the world's most used web browser, Internet Explorer has seen its market share drop along with its reputation as rivals such as Mozilla and Google pump out more and more features, support and speed for their web browsers.
The new IE supports CSS3 features such as rounded corners and opacity, while also now supporting SVG even though Microsoft is pushing its own Silverlight platform for rich graphics. At a conference in Las Vegas where IE6 was demoed, Microsoft showed H.264 video running at 720p in the browser, with the support for the video and audio content built-in.
The new Chakra Javascript engine compiles in the background on a separate CPU core if it is available on the machine. Microsoft is also including hardware acceleration into the browser to speed up web page rendering. The company calls it "GPU-powered-HTML5" which will greatly improve graphics performance within a browser and improve more normal tasks such as scrolling web pages by handing over processing to the graphics card.
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