Microsoft made waves in the browser community by being the first to announce GPU accelerated browsing, but oddly enough, it looks like they will be in a neck and neck race with Mozilla to be the first to market with the new feature in an official release. Firefox 4 Beta 4 which is releasing on Monday will include support for Direct2D acceleration; unfortunately however a few technical glitches have kept it from being “on” by default.

Luckily Mozilla has released details on how to reactivate it on their Wiki, and the process is pretty simple.

·         Direct2D is not turned on by default for Firefox 4 beta 4. (We weren't confident enough to turn it on for all users.)

·         However, all the code is in Firefox 4 beta 4, and it should work reasonably well for everyone.

·         We really need testers, both on the beta and on nightlies. (We plan to enable Direct2D in nightlies as soon as beta 4 is tagged and branched.)

·         To turn on Direct2D: Go in to about:config and set mozilla.widget.render-mode to 6, and gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled to true.

·         To turn off Direct2D, once it is on by default, set mozilla.widget.render-mode to 0.

·         To check whether you are running with Direct2D, go to about:support and look at the bottom. (Once bug 586046 lands, there will be even more - information about your graphics card in there.)

·         Please look out for memory usage, rendering speed, and any rendering problems you might see. Also focus on interactions with plugins like Flash.

Beta 4 will also bring the first official implementation of Tab Candy, a feature that is great for users with more tabs than pixels.