Firefox to Get GPU Acceleration Too
PrintAt Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference the Redmond giant showed off an early build of Internet Explorer 9 complete with GPU acceleration. Not to be outclassed, Mozilla has indicated they too are working on GPU acceleration for the popular Firefox browser. After the Microsoft demo, Mozilla Director of Developer Relations, Chris Blizzard tweeted, “Interesting that we're doing Direct2D support in Firefox as well - I'll bet we'll ship it first. :)"
Later, Firefox developer Bas Schouten wrote about the addition of Direct2D to the browser. He said the browser wouldn’t look much different, but rendering should be much improved. Schouten provided benchmark data for Direct2D rendering compared to standard Windows Graphic Device Interface (GDI). While some sites showed little difference, several saw dramatic reduction in rendering times. Hopefully we’ll see this technology sooner rather than later. However, there are currently no ship dates for either product.
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MeTo
November 27, 2009 at 7:44am
I would think the bottle neck would be your connection dial up/DSL/Satellite/Cable 56kbps~20Mbs What ever. If a Quad core 3 gig CPU can't handle it give it up. I think this is all just hype.
Razor86
November 25, 2009 at 10:59pm
There is a bit of confusion. There are some tasks that CPUs excell, but some they really suck at. Rendering images is one they kind of suck at. That's why we have graphics cards to play video games and to do complex rendering. I guess you could think of the CPU as a mathematician, and the GPU as an artist.
rook
November 25, 2009 at 8:47pm
Firefox is that much of a resource hog that it needs gpu acceleration.
daveyd
November 25, 2009 at 6:23pm
The latest version of IE8 which ships with Windows7 is faster than Firefox's latest release as of today. I benched both browsers and I thought firefox was going to be faster, but that is not the case.
Benched page loading times, refresh times, and scrolling from top to bottom on a lengthy graphics intensive web pages, and IE8 clearly has the upper hand.
aviaggio
November 25, 2009 at 6:08pm
Ok, I'm a bit confused. Does a Core i7 920 have trouble rendering web pages quickly enough? What kind of state is the web when browsers now have to be GPU accelerated?
The part that gets me is that the machines that really need the acceleration (older/slower machines, laptops, netbooks, etc.) most like won't be able to take advantage of GPU acceleration because the graphics hardware won't support it.
Maybe I'm just missing the point here.
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