Is IE9 the first Microsoft browser (in a long, long time) worth using?

Microsoft is certainly finding every last duck and throwing them into line aren’t they? I mean, WinPhone 7 is shaping up to be quite the mobile OS savior. Windows 7 is right up their with 10.6 as far as desktop OS’s go (subjective, I know). And now, one of the most criticized Microsoft products, Internet Explorer, is shaping up to be quite the looker even it’s extremely early preview stage. The biggest news on the IE 9 front is the move to a webkit-based rendering engine. This change will finally allow Redmond’s in-house browser to stay neck and neck with faster, “more modern” browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, and Safari to name a few.

So Microsoft unveiled a boat load of information about their next browser. How does it stack up to the competition? In short: pretty darn good. HTML 5 support is the biggie of course with the video support via .h264 as well as hardware accelerated graphics being pegged as other reasons to get all excited. In regards to the embedded video support, at M’s demo today in Vegas, two 720p videos were shown off side by side, stutter free and smooth as warm butter. That’s something I can certainly appreciate even if several other browsers have featured the same features for months now.

Another bragging point can be seen above in the rendering performance with the new webkit roots. Granted, it’s still not as fast as several newer browsers such as the freshly-out-of-beta Opera 10.5 or Chrome 5 dev version. But IE 9 itself is in the extreme early stages. A notable and intriguing showing no less.

I’ve been a very outspoken critic of Microsoft for a while. Not because I loathe them, but because I honestly hope that someday an employee would stumble by here and think: “Hmmm, where can we improve?” Whether they heard my criticisms or not, across the board Microsoft is making some decent and noteworthy strides. I’d even go as far to say that I’d love to see Microsoft take the whole IE9, Windows 7, Xbox, Media Center ecosystems and mesh them altogether into some uber platform that truly fits together — every nook and cranny. Such cohesion is generally an Apple-only trait. But if Microsoft can pull it off, they’ll have something special.

Excited — if not for the shear awesomeness (I can’t believe I’m saying “awesome” — in a positive tone — and “IE” in the same sentence) of any particular Microsoft product of late but instead of the overall picture that finally looks to be coming together? Focusing more specifically on IE 9, is this the browser from Microsoft that will finally be worth using and even recommended?

The curious bunch can pick up a copy of the early IE 9 preview here+. Bear in mind however that it is extremely basic as of right now, lacking even a basic address bar. Let us know how it goes for you!

Gizmodo

Want h.264 GPU assisted processing in Snow Leopard? Better have an Nvidia 9400M or better.

Snow Leopard is bringing with it many notable speed improvements, memory management techniques, and space saving features that are worth more than the surprising though greatly welcomed $29 price tag. Perhaps one of the greatest features that Snow Leopard will bring is that of the CPU offloading cycles to the GPU to speed up tasks when things get hot and heavy. As long as you have an Intel equipped Mac and a graphics card from the following:

• NVIDIA Geforce 8600M GT, GeForce 8800 GT, GeForce 8800 GTS, Geforce 9400M, GeForce 9600M GT, GeForce GT 120, GeForce GT 130

• ATI Radeon 4850, Radeon 4870

most of the benefits of Snow Leopard and GPU processing will be yours to have. However, if you’re a big h.264 supporter and were looking forward to enjoying h.264 GPU accelerated fun, I’m sorry to say that you’re going to be waiting for quite a long time. It seems that only Nvidia 9400M cards and greater will support h.264 acceleration. While this may be the end of the world to some, for others it will merely be a reason to upgrade. What’s your take?

Source: Crunch Gear