The Insomniac Coder

Image via CrunchBase Disclaimer: I am in the middle of one of my well-documented encounters with Insomnia. You've been warned. Very early impressions: Noticed the Hulu plus sponsored mode on the dashboard around 5:45 AM DST .  Took me a few clicks and one failed Google search to find out how the hell to download the stupid dashboard app. Eventually found it by going to the only obvious place in the dashboard where such a thing would be. The dashboard app had an update, this was installed instantly and with no interruption. I already have Hulu Plus, logging-in was painless and did not involve going to hulu.com to authorize the device.  Usage is consistent with the UI for things like Netflix and the Zune Marketplace . It took me less than a minute to get up to speed.  Watched a Daily Show clip, looked fine even if the volume was a bit off. And yes, there are ads even if you pay for Plus, which is the same experience as using a browser or the Roku HD. Watched...

And it still isn't fast enough. I made a little experiment by checking the IE 9 platform preview, the Firefox 4 beta 5 and the Google Chrome 7.0.503 dev with a Microsoft benchmark that was designed to show off IE9's new (back then) hardware acceleration features: Psychedelic Browsing . My results were, well, not what I expected: I mean, I knew that IE 9 would score fine, but I can't believe that Chrome did so badly. And yes, the GPU process for Chrome is clearly running. Can we even bitch about the benchmark not being fair? Update : I have tried this on the Chromium nightly build 58924 and it scored 10, and also saw some claims online that not all of the GPU acceleration for Chromium is up and running yet. Update #2 : I have also tried this on the Minefield nightly build, beta 6, and it scored 680, with IE 9 scoring 829 and Chrome dev a really shitty 10. I would love to know why the IE 9 score varies so wildly.  Related articles by Zemanta Firefox 4 Beta 5 Now A...