News Firefox 4 Beta 4 includes Direct2D

I'm already on 4.0b5pre. 4.0b4pre should have already been out before yesterday or so.

 

I'm trying out 4b4 now. Had 4b3 installed this past week after going through a big hunt for a replacement browser for FF3. I eventually came back to FF and there are things that FF4 fixes up nicely.

Anyway, so I have D2D enabled. I tried the H/W font rendering as well, but turned that off rapidly. It's rubbish, all blurry.

What I'd like to know, however, is what benefits we should be seeing with D2D enabled. I mean, FF runs as fast as it did without it. One would think they'd use it to stop FF max'ing out one of the cores on my AMD 955BE every time scroll a page. :-D

 

Hmm does that still happen with D2D enabled? I'd have hoped it wouldn't as I also get the problem with one of my cores getting maxed out too when scrolling a content heavy page, such as those using jpegs for background images (www.shopto.net is an ok example to test this). It's very choppy as well when scrolling.


Kinda sucks really why this happens on a high-end system for something as simple as displaying a web site.

 

Firefox 4 worked for a short while, and then it just stopped. The window wouldn't open even after resetting.

 

All the above comments about FF's RAM usage are exactly why I don't use it. Now, I'm hardly bleeding edge, having just upgraded from an Athlon Thunderbird w/768M to an Athlon 64 w/2G in January of this year (before that I was rocking a P-B 150MHz Pentium w/128M and the drop-in 1M VRAM upgrade into '07 - took me the longest time to figure out why sites with video always crashed the system, lulz).

All that said, it's always been ridiculous to me that FF eats up as much RAM as it does. I've been on Opera full time since they dropped the top banner that 'kept it free'. We're getting on FF4, and still they can't or won't do anything about the memory usage issues? No thanks, I'll take the hit on my geek cred and still have a computer I can multi-task on, with the browser open. There are a few add-ons I miss at work, but given the piece of crap Dell I have there, and that I typically have Opera (9-10 tabs), IE (1-2 tabs), Outlook, 3-5 instances of Excel, Crimson Editor, Irfanview, and the company's business suite open at once, I can't spare the RAM for Hungry Hungry Firefox.

 

I have D2D enabled and it doesn't, seem there is a spike in CPU load (increases by about 25% on 2 cores) and the multiplier steps up, but it doesn't max out anything. Of course, this is a totally unrealistic test, I have Cool'n'quiet enabled and a load of background stuff open.

 

Firefox 4 beta is much more jerky in Direct2D mode than Firefox 3.7a1pre when I scale and rotate images in this link:
http://people.mozilla.com/~vladimir/demos/photos.svg

I hope it gets better in the future.

I really look forward to Direct2D on Windows, then Microsoft will finally have cought up with MacOSX

- If you look at the three Quartz implementation diagrams in sequence, you can see how the video card portion of the diagram has slowly expanded over the course of four years to encompass more and more of the display layer. The reason is clear when you look at the bandwidth numbers: 30GB/s between the GPU and VRAM, and that number is climbing rapidly—much more rapidly than the bandwidth between the CPU and RAM.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2005/04/macosx-10-4.ars/14

I hope Windows 8 is entirlely in Direct2D and can render at 120fps on these new 120hz monitors

http://jooh.no/web/60hz_vs_120hz_smooth_mouse_cursor.jpg
http://jooh.no/web/120Hz_LCD_vs_CRT_comparison.jpg

- The ASUS VG236H was my first exposure to 120Hz refresh displays that aren’t CRTs, and the difference is about as subtle as a dump truck driving through your living room. I spent the first half hour seriously just dragging windows back and forth across the desktop - from a 120Hz display to a 60Hz, stunned at how smooth and different 120Hz was. Yeah, it’s that different.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3842/asus-vg236h-review-our-first-look-at-120hz

but you probably have already heard me goskel elsewhere by now hehe

 

tests and insight on firefox and direct2d:
http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2009/11/22/direct2d-hardware-rendering-a-browser