The IE Team released some early test results for IE 9. The main theme being that they have incorporated “Hardware Acceleration” into the new IE Rendering engine.
“IE[9] and Windows will make the power of PC hardware available to web developers in the browser. Specifically, we demonstrated hardware-accelerated rendering of all graphics and text in web pages, something that other browsers don’t do today. “
Later this graph shows the performance increase in the Javascript engine tests across multiple browser versions. It’s worth noting that FF, Chrome, and Safari all have low numbers because they found how to vastly optimize the javascript engine itself, so it can do more work with less cpu cycles. They all became more efficient and can do more with less .
IE9 is not improving their engine’s efficiency however; their simply throwing more of your hardware against the problem instead. Your system runs harder, hotter, and need more power overall. It will however render your page that much faster. One assumes however this is at the cost of everything else running on your system at the time, like video plugins and office applications.
