Firefox hopes to one-up IE with fast graphics
Last week, Microsoft showed off some browser technology that could help Internet Explorer leapfrog the competition. But if Mozilla succeeds in its hope, Microsoft could be playing catch-up instead.
The technology in question is hardware-accelerated graphics and text using interfaces called Direct2D and DirectWrite that provide an easy way to use graphics cards' computing power. They're built into Windows 7, and Microsoft is bringing them to Windows Vista but not Windows XP.
The performance boost from Direct2D and DirectWrite was the centerpiece of Microsoft's demonstration of Internet Explorer 9 goodies shown last week. Online maps flashed on the screen quickly and tracked mouse movements responsively; text was clearer and changed sizes more gracefully.
But the day of Microsoft's demo, Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard had this to tweet: "Interesting that we're doing Direct2D support in Firefox as well--I'll bet we'll ship it first."
There's work to back up his rhetoric. On Sunday, Bas Schouten, the programmer who's been leading the work for Mozilla, posted a prototype of Firefox using the Direct2D and DirectWrite.
Amazing read and fantastic news for us all. While Google tries to speed up webpage load times with a new HTTP protocol layer Microsoft and Mozilla try to speed up the browsers by utilising the computers GPU for graphics rendering.
It makes perfect sense. Why use a CPU to render graphics when the computers graphics card can do a much better job? Thanks to Windows 7 and soon Vista browsers will be able to utilise Direct2D and DirectWrite to render webpages.
It looks like a very promising upcoming technology that will speed up most webpages by around two-fold. Let's just hope Mozilla can release this technology by Firefox 4.0.
Check out Bas Schouten's website benchmarks of Direct2D vs GDI (last link in the quoted section above).
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