One of the more interesting points coming out of Internet Explorer 9 is the issue of hardware rendering of some elements of the page.
Fonts were plugged as one such example of improved rendering, although if the IE developer team is worth their money (they have certainly been doing a good job with IE8 so far,) they’ll be looking into squeezing as much performance out of DirectX as they can.
Internet Explorer for the uninitiated has traditionally been slow. The effect has been exacerbated by the latest versions 7 and 8 by a large memory-hungry interface that chugs even on moderate systems. Gone are the days where Internet Explorer was the “fastest” browser, because even when it’s preloaded into RAM, rival browsers like Chrome are orders of magnitude more nimble.
While the cost of processing has been steadily decreasing, the so too has the complexity of rendering for the web. While it’s fine to wait a few seconds for the browser to launch, having to wait repeatedly for pages to load or Javascript animations to complete can become frustrating. Especially with libraries like jQuery and Prototype putting the power of animation into the hands of people who would never previously have considered such effects feasible, we’re starting to see a lot of swooshing and fading that Internet Explorer quite honestly seems to choke on.
Sunspider shows remarkable improvements in Javascript rendering for Internet Explorer 9. It's still the slowest browser, but is now at least comparable to the others.
Hardware rendering will help alleviate this considerably, and I’m surprised it hasn’t taken off before now. Using a recent Opera build, I recently remarked that scrolling was so smooth, it had to be hardware rendered. It wasn’t, but my point is that it’s unusual to find the smoothness of say, iPhone browser scrolling on Firefox or especially Internet Explorer.
It will be interesting to see whether other browsers follow suit, and whether this will have such drastic performance improvements as can be noted in the graph halfway down the IEBlog write-up. It’s fantastic to watch the innovation coming from the different browser camps, and I’m anticipating IE9 will finally be the browser that we won’t tear out hair out trying to use.