Internet Explorer 9: Turning the Web into an app
Microsoft's corporate vice president Dean Hachamovitch introduces the "beauty of the Web". (Credit: Damian Koh/CNET Asia)
SAN FRANCISCO--If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then it's up to the users to decide if the beta release of Internet Explorer 9 fits its launch theme: The Beauty of the Web.
Held Wednesday morning at the Concourse Exhibition Center, a few streets away from the hoopla at Union Square in downtown San Francisco, the location reflects one of the key natures of the new browser. That is to provide a Web browsing experience that doesn't draw too much attention, yet still does its job. And, with IE 9, Web sites take center stage.
"The browser is a backdrop for the Web. Sites on the Web are the stars of the show," Microsoft's corporate vice president, Dean Hachamovitch, said at the launch.
If anything, one of the key messages at the half-hour event wasn't entirely about Internet Explorer.
"The Web is about sites, the browser should be, too," Hachamovitch added.
To illustrate that, he explained that people go to their PC for the applications, not Windows. Likewise, people logon to the Web for the Web sites, not the browser. "Today, Web sites are boxed in... the box is the browser", he said.
Speed is key
In order to un-box the experience, the browser has to tap on the capabilities of the PC to set the Web sites free from restraints and let them run like applications on the desktop . According to Microsoft, browsers today use only 10 percent of the hardware performance of the PC. The primary goal of IE 9 is to make use of the remaining 90 percent.
Enter hardware-accelerated graphics with support for the HTML 5 standard. (Note that Mozilla's Firefox 4 beta also offers full hardware acceleration.) By offloading tasks to the computer's graphics processing unit (GPU), the CPU's resources can be optimized for rendering text, images and videos, which result in a faster browsing experience.
To end-users, the increase in speed and shorter load times are akin to running a native application on Windows. Owners of PCs with an integrated graphics card instead of a discrete module won't be shortchanged, too, according to Microsoft.
Jonathan Gabbai, the solutions manager for eBay, described to CNET Asia that there's already a huge spike in performance using integrated GPUs with hardware acceleration. Any boost offered by a discrete graphics card beyond that isn't that significant, he explained.
But the best has yet to come. Internet Explorer 9, which is compatible with only Windows Vista and Windows 7, is crammed with new features and remarkable changes to the interface. Some are noticeably visible, while others are more subtle. Microsoft said there are no immediate plans for IE 9 to be supported on Mac OS X.
Jump Lists let the user go to a specific page on a Web site. Shown here are the Facebook and Twitter social-networking sites. (Credit: Screenshot by Damian Koh/CNET Asia)
No comments:
Post a Comment