Google’s Chrome has placed last in a Windows-based HTML 5 drag race that pitted the browser against Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer.
“Chrome – even with hardware acceleration turned on via command line switches – is in a distant last place, miles behind both Firefox and IE,” wrote Sebastian Anthony of the Download Squad.
“Opera competes well up to a point, but eventually gives way to Firefox and IE with 1,000 fishies swimming about.”
Anthony also noted that both Firefox and IE9 fully exploited Direct2D to harness the GPU’s rendering power.
“So, it’s probably no surprise that they both show very similar results. It’s most apparent when comparing CPU use; IE9 and FF3.7 are both miles ahead in performance, but both show the lowest CPU utilization.”
However, Anthony added that Chrome was likely to feature “full hardware acceleration” soon enough.
“The thing I’m most interested in is whether we’ll see cross-platform hardware acceleration. [Still], Direct2D doesn’t exist on either Mac or Linux – so we’ll see how it pans out.”
