KDE will soon run even faster! (QT 4.7 released)

Nokia announced yesterday the release of QT 4.7, which comes with very interesting new features, the most notable of which is probably speed.



The official ANNOUNCEMENT goes into specifics and clarifies which areas will be most benefited from this improvement. Here's an excerpt:

"Improved performance, quicker apps

Qt 4.7 includes significant performance improvements that make applications and user interfaces run faster and smoother. Examples of these improvements include:

- New hardware accelerated compositing in QtWebkit has accelerated QtWebkit animation rendering by 31% over Qt 4.6.0, resulting in “snappier” user interfaces.
- In benchmark tests of popular websites, Facebook pages scrolled up to 67% faster, and other, less complicated pages scrolled on average 350% faster* due to significant scrolling speed improvements in QtWebkit.
- The new QStaticText class makes text render more than twice as fast as in Qt 4.6.
- The QPainter engine makes it possible to draw particle systems more efficiently in OpenGL."

This is particularly exciting, because the late improvements in performance that could be experienced in recent KDE releases came partially from QT enhancements. If these figures work as expected, perhaps we will start feeling their benefits as soon as KDE 4.6, which is planned for release next March.

Once again, the future looks bright for KDE and its users!