“This is a direct improvement to everybody’s usage of the Web on a daily basis,” Hachamovitch said in an interview after Sinofsky’s speech. “Web developers are doing what they did before, only now they can tap directly into a PC’s graphics hardware to make their text work better and graphics work better.”

A couple of interesting improvements are frame rates when resizing text, Bing Maps(frame rate jumps from 5-8fps to almost 60fps) Java scripting has been improved also. How did they do this? They are using something called Direct2D which lets IE9 use hardware acceleration for web graphics, much in the same was as 3D games harness the GPU.

I guess Microsoft finally realized that they have to pour some resources back into Internet Explorer considering that Mozilla Firefox has 25% of the browser share and IE slipping to around 63%. They definitely don’t want to slip below 60% that would look ugly.

Check out the video, its quite interesting. accelerated

-NS