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This page works best with
Internet Explorer 11
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Yes, you read that correctly. No, this is not a joke. This web page makes extensive use of canvas drawing, which Internet Explorer does significantly faster than Firefox and Chromium. If the visuals are choppy or stuttering, consider switching to IE 11 for a much smoother experience.
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I've always wanted to plaster my website with a "Use this browser for this site!" banner. Until creating this homepage, though, I never had any good reason to do so. "Oh, it'll just be Firefox, anyways," I'd tell myself everytime the thought crossed my mind. Not once did I ever imagine that, after going through the testing rigmarole on the big three, the most performant browser for my website was... Internet Explorer? Really? But, it's probably by a razor-thin margin, right? ...right? No. Not at all. IE 11 is about 40-50% faster than contemporary Firefox and Chromezilla at 2D canvas rendering, at least on my PCs. To the eye, it feels more like 80-90%, since IE 11 has near-perfect synchronization between rendering and presenting, whereas the others, especially Firefox, tend to skip a quarter or more of their completed frames. So, what gives? Did I optimize extensively for Internet Explorer? No. Actually, quite the opposite. This page has numerous optimizations to improve performance with Firefox and Chromezilla, using modern browser features that IE 11 does not have. Internet Explorer is forced to take the slow path at every fork in the road; yet it is the Little Browser that Could™ cross the finish line before Google's smoke-belching V8 is even halfway there. For as stunning as this is, I have no doubt that IE 11's masterful performance was the work of incredibly talented DirectX 9, 10, 11 teams, just under a decade ago.
So now, here I am, staring on in disbelief as I put up an Internet Explorer recommendation on my website in 2022.
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