IE9 will have, hardware acceleration?

This super-early look at Internet Explorer baffles me. The biggest benefit they tout is using the DirectX APi to use hardware acceleration for rendering web pages faster. This is like buying me a faster processor and then giving the credit to IE when pages load faster as a resutl.

Wouldn’t a good Window Manager offload that work so that applications don’t deal with it? It must be the only way to catch up to Chrome on Linux.

At the PDC today, in addition to demonstrating some of the progress on performance and interoperable standards, we showed how IE 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. Web site developers will see performance gains and other benefits without having to re-write their sites.

IEBlog : An Early Look At IE9 for Developers