accelerator

One of the major components essential for the future of Firefox just landed in the beta build of the browser, and it gives the open-source browser the page-rendering speed boost that it had been lacking.

Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, Firefox 4 beta 7 introduces JagerMonkey, Mozilla's next-generation JavaScript engine that puts the browser in the same ballpark as its high-speed competitors. The old TraceMonkey engine was slow enough to no longer be in the same league as Chrome, Opera, Safari, and the Internet Explorer 9 beta.

Mozilla describes the improvements as incorporating the JagerMonkey JIT compiler into … Read more

I don't subscribe to cable TV, nor do I regularly watch TV shows. Instead, I stream most of my digital content via online services, but I find it quite frustrating when it starts buffering and freezing at the most critical times during the show. You all know what I mean if you've tried to watch streaming videos online. It can take forever. With that said, today, I bring you a special offer from Speedbit on its Video Accelerator Premium product, which promises to improve your online video viewing experience by significantly reducing buffering and freezing problems, and accelerating … Read more

OSLO, Norway--Opera Software announced significant new steps for its browsers today, including the release soon of Opera Mobile for Android phones and extensions technology in the upcoming Opera 11 for computers.

In both those cases--and also in the Opera Mini browser for less capable phones--the browsers will come with a major new feature: hardware acceleration to speed the display of pages and operations such as scrolling and panning. That change is essential to keep Opera relevant in a highly competitive industry.

Android is aligned well with Opera's business strategy. First, Google's mobile operating system, unlike Apple's iOS, … Read more

Google is among the browser makers rushing to accelerate their software by tapping into the power of a computer's graphics hardware, but it appears that ability will have to wait for Chrome 9.

Just as Google branched off the code that will become Chrome 8 work early this morning, indicating that it's time to iron out the bugs to release a stable version of Chrome 7, programmers also pushed back a lot of hardware acceleration features until Chrome 9.

Among the items on the hardware acceleration to-do list pushed back from Chrome 8 to 9 yesterday are support for large layers, opacity fixes, a variety of Canvas issues for 2D graphics, and support for CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) abilities to create reflections, drop shadows, and cutouts called masks. Hardware-based video decoding was pushed back to Chrome 9 a few days earlier.

Hardware acceleration, a flagship feature of Microsoft's IE9, is a top item for browser makers eager to stay competitive, speed up their products, enable new features impossible without it, and tackle mobile computing performance challenges. It's not an easy matter, though, with complications from the wide range of graphics hardware computers come with and the inconsistent software support they come with. … Read more

Firefox for Mac OS X hadn't been Mozilla's top priority in the feverish race to give a hardware boost to the task of drawing Web pages on a screen, but it looks as if the technology will arrive in time for Firefox 4.

Windows not only is more widely used than Mac OS X but also is where Microsoft has been touting its hardware-accelerated IE9 work. So it wasn't a great surprise that Mozilla's first work for hardware acceleration arrived there. But yesterday, the organization decided to try to squeeze in some Mac acceleration just before a critical Firefox 4 deadline.

The next Firefox beta, the seventh, is set to be the last for the addition of new features. This feature-freeze stage is essential to give enough debugging time to meet the planned 2010 release of Firefox 4.

It's not certain the acceleration for the Mac will make it. Mozilla programmers decided to build it into the developer versions of Firefox released nightly for more testing then reconvene later this week to decide how to proceed.

Firefox's Windows version includes some hardware acceleration using Microsoft's Direct3D 9 graphics interface, with Direct3D 10 support on the way. The Mac version uses a competing interface, OpenGL, that's not as well-supported on Windows. … Read more

Recent Microsoft and Intel primers on Internet Explorer 9's accelerated graphics point to snappier Web browsing.

Microsoft will launch the beta of the upcoming Internet Explorer browser on Wednesday at an event in San Francisco as competition from Chrome, Firefox, and Safari has spurred Redmond to beef up its graphics acceleration, among other improvements. And Intel is slated to introduce its Sandy Bridge chip architecture, with features enhanced graphics silicon, at the Intel Developer Forum, which begins on Monday.

In a blog posted on Friday, Microsoft spelled out what it says are the merits of "full vs. partial acceleration," while Intel, in a new video, is claiming IE9 acceleration on its Core i series of chips--which will include new Sandy Bridge processors.

Graphics chip-based acceleration (Microsoft calls it "hardware acceleration") shifts some tasks from the main processor (CPU) to the graphics processor (GPU). Mainstream GPUs pack in dozens or even hundreds of processing cores. While each GPU core delivers a tiny fraction of the processing power of a CPU core, combined, they can tackle certain tasks much more quickly and efficiently than a CPU. Intel, for its part, has improved the built-in graphics on its Core i series of processors and will integrate its fastest graphics function yet onto the CPU in its upcoming Sandy Bridge processor.

In the Microsoft blog, Ted Johnson, program manager lead for Web graphics at Microsoft, explained the merits of a "fully-hardware accelerated display pipeline that runs from their markup to the screen."

In March, Johnson explains, Microsoft released the first IE9 Platform Preview with GPU-powered HTML5 turned on by default, enabling hardware acceleration on "everything on every Web page" including text, images, backgrounds, borders, SVG (scalable vector graphics) content, and HTML5 video and audio.… Read more

Audi's new A8 rewrites the description for a high-tech car; the feds put the brakes on blaming tech for Toyotagate; and is your car the hacker's next frontier? Lotus has plans to go way beyond the Evora, and we thrash the very tossable new Subaru WRX with the big body.

• Audi A8 is a high-tech powerhouse

• Hacking cars wirelessly via tire pressure sensor

• Site for Chrysler MyGig updates and hacks

• CNET reviews the 2011 Subaru Impreza WRX

• CNET reviews the 2010 Mazda MX-5 Miata PRHT… Read more

Adobe's beta version of Flash 10.1 player let you test out hardware accelerated video decoding on your Mac. Despite a few bugs, the beta version provided a notable decrease in CPU use when watching Flash videos. With its latest security update, Adobe adds hardware accelerated video decoding to the release version of Flash 10.1 player.

While Adobe usually reserves major feature additions for a full version update, the company must have felt it was too good of a feature to keep from users. Despite Flash now supporting hardware accelerated video decoding, it only works on recent Macs … Read more

The fourth and final developer's preview of Internet Explorer 9 was released on Wednesday, with significant updates to standards compliance and rendering speed, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft said in a blog post that the developer's previews had been downloaded more than 2.5 million times, indicating that despite Internet Explorer's plummeting market share over the past few years, developer interest in seeing it improve remains high.

The vast and dramatic improvements made to Internet Explorer 9 are readily apparent, even in this stripped-down preview version. Hardware accelerated HTML5 support is a major and multifaceted component of IE9, … Read more