Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdoherty | Hacker News Reader

Even more impressive is their HTML5, WebGL, audio and video demo linked to in the post:

http://videos-cdn.mozilla.net/serv/mozhacks/flight-of-the-na...

I remember some months (maybe more than a year ago) when there was a story about a Doom-style engine in Javascript and someone commented how sad it was that with all this powerful technology, we're getting excited about 1990s style graphics in web browsers.

I had sympathy for that but it now seems to me like web technologies are improving at such a rate that we'll hit near-native performance in a few years (of course, technologies like Google's NaCl can do that now but it would be quite something to see technologies like WebGL and Javascript close the performance gap).

View this demo in Firefox 4, then view IE9's demo in IE9: http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/Galactic/Defau...

These demos really demonstrates the difference between Firefox 4 and IE9.

For those of us that can't / don't want to install IE9, can you describe the differences?

Great test. I don't have IE9 (since I need IE8 for testing, and MS still hasn't figured out how/conjured the will to make IE work like a normal application), but it's interesting to compare FF4 and Chrome. The performance looked about equivalent between the 2. Neither reports a framerate, so not sure about the exact numbers.

Just a FYI - You can uninstall IE9 from your computer. It's not listed in the Add/Remove Programs list but you can find it under the "Installed Updates" list.

And everything truly reverts to the same as it was before, Vista with IE7 upgraded to IE8? I'm (understandably in my opinion) a bit wary. I need to test websites on a normal installation of IE8. IE often has odd little details that make one machine act different from another once you start changing things.

My machine (with 102 other processes currently running) didn't break 17.5% CPU usage during the entire demo and my GPU fan never spun up. Not bad.

What OS and graphics card are you using?

I pegged my CPU and got about three frames per second in both Chrome and Firefox, but that's on Linux with Intel graphics; about the bottom of the heap as far as 3D acceleration goes.

Win7 and a GTX 275.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com