It's quiet possible IE is doing the sensible thing and caching the images. It's really more a black mark on firefox and chrome than it is a commendation of IE.

That seems a little unfair. Presumably somebody on the IE team recognised the potential improvement here and wrote code to implement it. Isn’t that sort of attention to detail worthy of praise?

This demo is symptomatic of a general and irritating trend with modern Chrome and Firefox: the development teams seem to be very interested in doing enough to tick a box claiming they support a certain feature, but the quality of implementation can still be poor, sometimes to the point of being unusable as in this case. SVG is a common culprit, but for example typography in Chrome is another repeat offender.

It seems absurd that on a fairly high-spec PC I’m using to write this, Firefox running this simple SVG demo consumes more system resources than Maya doing production-quality 3D rendering. But something seems to have gone wrong with Firefox specifically a few months ago, because simply scrolling up and down a page now seems to be enough to ramp a workstation GPU up to full speed, and consequently just browsing a few pages using Firefox for half an hour can have the GPU fans running fast enough to be loud and the UPS showing a noticeably increase in power consumption for the workstation. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what could possibly explain this or exactly when it started happening, so it’s difficult to file any sort of useful bug report. :-(

>This demo is symptomatic of a general and irritating trend with modern Chrome and Firefox: the development teams seem to be very interested in doing enough to tick a box claiming they support a certain feature, but the quality of implementation can still be poor, sometimes to the point of being unusable as in this case. SVG is a common culprit, but for example typography in Chrome is another repeat offender.

That's development in general. Is it not? It's hard to find houses that don't have a focus on stuff like that. As averse as I am to it, I also have to admit it is a good thing. It's just embarrassing when the covers come off and the dirty hacks are revealed.

Which is why I found it odd to see such a decent UX from IE. Microsoft really never wanted to support SVG, so I didn't expect comparatively good support. There is a lot of stuff in WPF and presumably SilverLight that is analogous to SVG, so it isn't as if Microsoft doesn't know how to hardware accelerate geometry drawing.