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Comment by jolie | Hacker News Reader

It's one of those things that you don't want to be true... But there it is. Ben Parr was at a press event today for IE9 and confirmed to Mashable staff that, according to the tests, IE9 is gonna be hella fast.

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...why do you not /want/ it to be true?

It's a good thing that all other browsers have stopped development. Or maybe a better test would be comparing browsers with hardware acceleration against each other? Does anyone compare two games, one with hardware rendering and one with software rendering? No, of course not. That would be crazy.

Chrome is currently the fastest at this; what else would you have them test against?

They can test against whatever they want, but the fact still remains that IE9 is basically using 'specialized hardware' to reach that speed. What happens when Chrome also supports this specialized hardware? [i.e. I hope that the IE Team doesn't feel like they can skimp on performance elsewhere by just throwing hardware at the problem, rather than fixing/improving their engine.]

The current developer build of Chrome/Chromium has hardware acceleration (switch enabled). The 3.7 developer build of Firefox also has it (and it's supposed to be faster than IE9). Why didn't they compare those, since IE9 is also a developer build?

Chrome's acceleration is not of the entire page. It is only acceleration of things like 3D transforms and a few other things.

Chrome is currently the fastest at this

No it isn't. Firefox in software mode (release builds) is generally faster than Chrome when it comes to canvas. Firefox in hardware mode (pre-release, Direct2D) is around as fast as IE.

A competitive marketplace is proving better than stagnant monopoly. Long live the competition.

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