Programmer adds IE 9 graphics acceleration to Firefox
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted November 25th 2009 5:01PM
posted November 25th 2009 5:01PM
Not so fast, Internet Explorer! We know that you have great things in the works for IE 9 -- including Direct2D GPU acceleration, the 2D / vector graphics API that we first laid eyes on in Windows 7. And believe us, that got our attention -- as well as the attention of Mozilla programmer Bas Schouten. It seems that over the weekend, the young man successfully loaded Direct2D support into an alpha build of Firefox 3.7 -- just days after you announced its inclusion in the next version of your web browser. "Things are looking very promising for Direct2D" and Firefox, said Schouten, although "older PCs with pre-D3D10 graphics cards and WDDM 1.0 drivers will not show significant improvements." And we thought that accelerometer support was wild!
@poematik14 CTRL-SHIFT-N, and all will be well :-D
@N900, Incognito? Somebody called me? :huh:
@Bowsa Because Firefox has soul, my brotha
@poematik14 Hey, that's just extra weight..
Meh. OpenGL support would be better. Cross platform and all. Better than nothing I suppose.
@HotBBQ
Go Noles!!!
@HotBBQ
Opera is bringing it's new core apparently with next major release (10.50 I guess) and it uses Direct3D on windows and OpenGL elsewhere (Mac, Linux, mobiles, etc.).
Too bad the world (including Engadget.com) didn't say/blog/publish anything when Opera revealed that they were actively working on hardware accelerated browser engine in June 2008...
But as always, when copycats Firefox & IE do it, it is sexy and worth publishing.
@Edobe
Is that you Gabe?
@(Unverified)
So they have had a YEAR head start and it STILL renders slower than Chrome/WebKit?
Thats newsworthy right there.
@(Unverified)
This is about the visual performance not measuring javascript calculations per second. When the hardware acceleration comes out it will still probably score lower in synthetic benches because sunspider and the like aren't testing how choppy it is to scroll a pic heavy page with lot's of transparencies.
@(Unverified)
Opera ... isn't that the company that keeps whining to the EU commission about Microsoft's browser selection process.
@KillaChaos They've only been working on it for the last two/three weeks. Before then they were focused on IE8 on Windows 7.
so firefox is resorting to copying IE. its not gonna work. have fun with your memory leaks.
@Troll, nobody uses IE anyway, it's a dead browser. Better off with FF or Chrome, Opera, Safari, etc.
Let's not forget native ogg video playback. Man, that'll change everything.
These guys have really weird heads.
@Laura June Thx :D
It's kind of sad that applications as "simple" as browsers need GPU-acceleration to speed up their 2D graphics rendering instead on relying on faster code. Just goes to show how bloated browsers are now a days.
Don't get me wrong, I love Firefox and think this news is pretty darn interesting, but jebus christ it's pathetic that a browser (any browser) would need the kind of processing power that a GPU has to offer just to do something as simple as play a video, display some text or draw some 2D lines on a screen... that's the type of stuff that 1st generation Pentiums were more than capable of doing all by themselves.
How about writing some tighter code, and you wouldn't have to tap into the GPU to acceleration. Messing around with a million+ 3D polygons in MAYA or 3DS MAX, yeah, that's when a GPU is understandably need; to display some 2D Flash-heavy website shouldn't need the power of a GPU.
@Hazdaz Because nowadays we are watching tonnes of online videos and surf through billions of photos. Also we follow number of live feeds. When all these actions doing together, browser needs more power. :)
@Hazdaz
no one says you need it, but it's more of a why not sort of deal
everyone knows GPUs are much more powerful than CPUs, that's why AMD bought ATi, intel is making Larrabee, and nVIDIA is pushing CUDA, and as consumers demand faster programs, developers will use whatever they can in their arsenal
@Hazdaz
So first you tell them to get their acts together and write faster code, then when they do what coders have historically done to extract every ounce of performance (ie. get the code as close to native code as possible and remove any abstraction layer they can) you bitch based on your imaginary concept of what a 'real' coder would have done?
@(Unverified)
I understand the whole "why not?" argument, but that same kind of thinking has brought us wordprocessing programs :cough: Word :cough: that take up nearly a gigabyte worth of space and with the minimum spec requirements to prove it. Just a few years ago, the WHOLE damn office suite took up less space and used less resources than just one app does today.
I am just so very sick of the bloat. I am sick of seeing that Firefox is eating up more memory and using up more resources on my quad-core computer, than true heavy-duty applications like video editors, 3D modeling apps or even CAD programs.
Ugh.
@Hazdaz: That's a rather silly comment. We're talking about a drawing API... drawing into GPU memory. Why would you want to do that drawing in CPU? It would be ridiculously slow, in comparison.
What is this magical 'faster code' that you are referring to? Even the 'pentium' that was 'capable of doing all' that, didn't do that, because we used 2D hardware acceleration even back in those days.
@Hazdaz
It isn't needed for some lines, it's needed for cases with half a million lines, obviously this isn't for the normal stuff but for those cases where the envelope is pushed.
Why not use OpenGL so that all of Firefox's platforms can support this?
@(Unverified)
As has been stated before, this is to take advantage of the api/engine in Windows. I'm sure on other platforms it'[ll use OpenGL.
@(Unverified) Clearly engadget writers use IE, because they're implying firefox doesn't work.
So it'll now be like a turtle on steroids ?.. can't wait.
Hate to point this out but the photoshop job on the IE logo wasn't the greatest can still see the outline, firefox one is good through ;)
@matroscoe w00t, I'm not the only one who noticed it!
@matroscoe Thats because IE is broken in ALL aspects. Even when you try to photoshop the logo it breaks the web....
@wrenbjor haha good old IE ... its to bad though i was pretty sure i read somewheres that Microsoft promised us they would stop working on more IE builds ... i mean 32/100 on ACID3 test pitiful :(
Anyone see the actual IE9 benchmarks? Even with GPU acceleration, its slower than some of the faster browsers. Granted, its probalby not even in the alpha stage yet, but still...You gotta wonder how fast the current fastest browsers would be with GPU acceleration...And once it becomes standard, if speed will become a moot point.
@(Unverified) That's Javascript performance, has *nothing* to do with GPU accel. The IE9 guys with a few weeks of work already got the JS engine up to Chrome 2.0 or such while the browser will at least have a few months more development.
GPU accel speeds up redraw rates, one of the chief reasons why I hate using Firefox and end up using Chrome/IE8 x64 (because they draw pages just that bit faster, immensely less annoying)
Good to see progress underway here.
I don't see anything great about Mozilla supporting a new Microsoft API. Why isn't there a competing OpenGL 2D API? Balmer needs to take a break.
Nice, cant wait when firefox 3.7 comes out, But 4.0 should be there biggest step forward, also Micro"soft" copies soo much
So this is cool and all but I don't want to pick up my desktop system to get a cool effect on the web :-\ (If it had an accelerator that is)
People don't seem to understand. They're just adding another back-end to Cairo (the graphics middleware that Firefox uses).
Cairo already supports OpenGL as a back-end; I don't know why it's not used on Linux/OSX. Certainly considering the broken xrender performance in nVidia drivers, it'd lead to huge speed boosts.
funny that firefox (the black guy) is winning the race
my 8800 gts 640 is already in the dead water due to no support from flash 10.1 gpu acceleration. my question is, will these upcoming gpu accelerated browsers support my video card? and or accelerate the uberly slow facebook farmville flash based browser game?