Digital Home Thoughts: Internet Explorer 9 Demos Hardware Acceleration

"For hardware companies, it's like a dream come true: after years of failed attempts at using 3D on the web, graphical user interfaces and video will make their GPUs indispensable to practically all web users. This is yet one more reason to demand a graphics processor in your computer. And because all this new stuff is based on DirectX, AMD and NVIDIA did not have to sweat too much (if at all): it's all supported in the existing drivers."

Good thing that Internet Explorer 9 will only be used by proper notebooks and desktops. If Internet Explorer 9 were to be used by netbooks, it would be crippled by poorly performing hardware acceleration. But that is okay, because Intel believes that netbooks do not need to have good 3D capabilities. Yes, I am not willing to let that one go. The writing is on the wall, and hardware acceleration is becoming more common for more and more tasks. Sure, I cannot imagine how one would use thousands of browser elements to manage my webmail, but the capability should be there, and someone else could come up with some wonderful new way that could only be possible through innovations such as this. And this will not just be a Internet Explorer thing. From the looks of it, it is where the future of web browsers lie.