Internet Explorer 9 adopts GPGPU acceleration, HTML5

Microsoft revealed a glimpse of Internet Explorer 9 in a new Internet Explorer Platform preview, available for download over here. The new version of IE is looking pretty good, the software giant is working hard on boosting the JavaScript performance of its browser, the adoption of GPGPU computing should deliver impressive performance gains, and the company also promises HTML5 support.

At the MIX conference today, we demonstrated how the standard web patterns that developers already know and use broadly run better by taking advantage of PC hardware through IE9 on Windows. This blog post provides an overview of what we showed today, across performance, standards, hardware-accelerated HTML5 graphics, and the availability of the IE9 Platform Preview for developers.

First, we showed IE9’s new script engine, internally known as “Chakra,” and the progress we’ve made on an industry benchmark for JavaScript performance. With the differences between script engines on benchmarks approaching the duration of an eye-blink, we described our approach for making real-world sites faster. Chakra compiles JavaScript in the background on a separate core of the CPU, parallel to IE.

More info about the new features in the IE9 Preview can be read at IEBlog. Below is a graph from Microsoft that compares the JavaScript performance of the latest IE9 preview with several other browsers (lower is faster):