acceleration

Only a week after Google upgraded the stable version of Chrome to 11, the company bumped its beta users to version 12 beta last night. Google Chrome 12 beta (download for Windows | Mac | Linux) pushed a moderate range of under-the-hood improvements to Chrome beta users, including better hardware acceleration, stronger privacy controls, and slightly safer file downloads. It also killed support for Google Gears, a move the company announced back in March.

The new beta includes two security improvements. Flash-based local shared objects, which are bits of Web sites stored locally on your computer, can now be deleted from within … Read more

Be careful venting your frustrations with modern technology when using the latest version of Google Chrome, released today. Chrome 11 (download for Windows | Mac | Linux) comes with the ability to convert your speech to text, which could prove to be a big boon to people who have difficulty with keyboards as well as providing on the go translations when used with Google Translate.

The new feature, based in HTML5, requires a microphone icon embedded in the Web page. Click the icon and then speak into your computer's mic. The input records as text, and the browser automatically inserts the … Read more

The Large Hadron Collider has surpassed a record set by Fermilab's rival particle accelerator for what's called luminosity, a milestone that improves the odds that the gargantuan scientific experiment will produce new physics discoveries.

The LHC operators yesterday packed more bunches of protons into the beam, increasing the likelihood of collisions and therefore of the detection of very rare outcomes from those collisions.

"Beam intensity is key to the success of the LHC, so this is a very important step," said General Rolf Heuer, director of the CERN facility that operates the LHC, in a statement. &… Read more

After some real-world tests, Microsoft has concluded IE9 is the most energy-efficient of the major browsers on the market.

Microsoft compared its new browser with Opera 11, Firefox 4, Chrome 10, and Safari 5 on an Intel laptop, measuring how many watts the machine consumed with the browser idling, showing a news site, and running graphics-intensive Web tests.

The upshot: IE9 is the most efficient in the test, meaning it'll take the smallest toll on the battery.

"We hope and encourage the industry and other browser vendors to follow us on the path to a more power efficient … Read more

Hardware acceleration has become the holy grail of browser development in the past year, as the technology to increase browser performance by tapping graphics cards to help with Web site rendering has advanced from the theoretical to the practical. Despite Opera being a longtime developer and advocate of hardware acceleration standards, and the first major browser maker to demonstrate hardware acceleration in use, no publicly released version of Opera included the technology--until today.

Opera 11.50 (direct download) is a rough alpha, unstable, not for daily use, and limited to Windows computers, but it does have hardware acceleration. This means … Read more

BARCELONA--Apple gets plenty of praise for advancing mobile browsers with its iPhone's version of Safari, but an audience greeted its performance with some laughter as Microsoft compared it to an upcoming version of IE9 for Windows Phone 7.

Joe Belfiore, a Microsoft corporate vice president, showed off the browser here at the Mobile World Congress show during a keynote speech by Chief Executive Steve Ballmer. Specifically, Belfiore showed it running a Microsoft fishtank demonstration that's been in widespread use since the hardware acceleration work began in earnest among personal computer browser makers last year.

And he got a … Read more

The Khronos Group today released updates to two interfaces designed to make it easier for programmers to tap into the power of computing hardware.

First is OpenSL ES 1.1, an interface for C programmers to use sound hardware on mobile devices. The interface abstracts technologies such as graphic equalizer processing, reverberation or 3D spatial Doppler effects, playback and volume controls, and audio data recording.

The purpose of the interface is to liberate programmers from having to recraft their applications each time a new device arrives with a different, often proprietary interface. Khronos released profiles tailored for phones, music players, … Read more

Mozilla and Microsoft have been racing to see which will be the first to release a production-quality browser with hardware-accelerated graphics, but at the current rate, it could be Google's Chrome 9 that crosses the finish line first.

Google likely will be issuing Chrome 9 in beta form soon. It had been planned for Tuesday, but Anthony LaForge, a Chrome technical program manager, pushed it back. "The crash rate [of] 400 crashes per million page loads on the browser is simply too high," he said in a mailing list message

Hardware acceleration isn't a simple either-or … Read more

A few people on the Apple Discussion boards have described an issue that seems to have cropped up in OS X 10.6.5, where the system may force-quit the log-in session when attempting to play video.

This is not a widespread problem, but has affected a few people and seems to happen when they use certain media players that support hardware-accelerated video playback. When the crash occurs, the system may flash a blue or black screen and then present the log-in window, quitting all user applications and unsaved data. Not all video players spur this behavior, and the problem … Read more