News Firefox 3.7 gets Direct2D support

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2009/11/27/firefox-3-7-gets-direct2d-support/1

An alpha build of Firefox 3.7 - the next-next gen browser from the Mozilla Foundation - includes support for Direct2D on Windows 7 and Vista, offloading rendering on to the GPU.

 

My first thought, "Why on earth is Firefox endorsing Direct2Drive???"

 

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I have never liked scrolling on web-pages, it's allways choppy, so i had my hopes up for this one, however, things are not really different. The scrolling is mostly the same, text input is slow, switching fans takes like half a second up to one second some times. Firefox uses 20-30 % cpu all the time, so not really any improvements here. But Alpha yeah I get it

No wonder they call this version "Minefield" by the way.

 

Text input noticeabley slower but navigating and scolling much better/smoother, a few graphical glitches on forums (horizontal lines) but seems like an excellenrt idea

 

What about Linux? Does that mean they're gonna use openGL or something?

 

Is it really noticeable to such an extent? According to the graph, most sites render in software in 10-12 milliseconds and with the hardware rendering that figure is halved.

But is it really possible to tell the difference between 10ms & 5ms - that is, between one hundredth and one two-hundredth of a second? Especially given that the real bottleneck is probably not in the rendering but the internet connection speed and then the parsing of the HTML and whatever else?

I'm just wondering whether this isn't just marketing hype...

 

I thought that Vista didn't accelerate D2D? Windows 7 does, but Vista didn't, that's why drop down list boxes lag slower than even XP on Vista. Also when they updated Vista to DX11 they didn't include the new D2D->D3D virtualization...

 

No, Vista got Direct2D in a platform update that coincided with SP3's release.
Clicky

 

I was about to ask if installing the alpha meant I had to uninstall my current version but then remembered it was already screwed up anyway so what the hell, I'll give it a shot
edit: never mind, no installation required



First observation : Text is slightly blurry at some places. Rendering is definitely different but it's hard to say if it's faster. I guess I'll have to test for more than 12.5seconds

 

Whichever OS has the dominant desktop market position, this will always be the case. At the moment and for the foreseeable short- to medium-term future, it's Windows.

 

No installation req'd.Its indeed faster than my chrome..I agreed with Ghys, slight blurred text..easily adjusted using Win 7 text tools..

 

using it right now. its about the same as firefox 3.5. i found the text "problems" already Does anyone else think calling it minefield sounds alot cooler than firefox?

 

Apparently,I found that the more tabs are opened, more GPU memory are consumed too.. (200MB Chrome 24 tabs vs 648MB Minefield FF 30 tabs), I wonder if this affects gaming..

 

What I find amazing is that the browser is still leagues behind Chrome/Chromium in terms of performance, and it doesn't even use any of these kinds of technologies (yet).

 

leagues ? Chrome never impressed me at all...

 

Me neither. It doesn't have the add-ons that firefox has and no marginal speed improvements can fix that.

 

I've found Chrome to be much slower than firefox. Controversial I know! But I play a facebook game called hobowars and I can't use Chrome, it's way too slow. In the game you have to click through lots of pages to use up your "time" by begging or fighting other hobos. Take too long and some one else will kill you first. With Chrome you open a page and the mouse will change to it's busy animation and doesn't like to get interrupted if you want to click a link before the page has finished. Not only does Firefox instantly load the very light hobowars webpages. It also instantly responds to interrupts and doesn't waste CPU cycles by switching to a busy mouse animation.

 

Whether it "impressed" you is not an issue here, some people simply don't like Chrome/chromium and I'm happy with that. But it doesn't change the facts that Chrome (And other webkit-based browsers like Safari) are the best performing web browser platforms available. I hate safari with a passion, but I am still level headed enough to admit that it's built on a solid foundation that's generally better than most other browsers - Internet explorer in particular. Not that I'm suggesting that is difficult to accomplish.

Chromium has had addon support for 4+ months, and it will be officially supported when Chrome 4 is released to the public, which shouldn't be too long considering the pace of development on the browser so far. Chrome/Chromium and Internet Explorer are the only popular web browsers that have tab and plugin sandboxing, Chromium has the extremely efficient V8 javascript engine and it's built on the solid, open source underpinnings of the Webkit platform. Other than personal preference, which is obviously not at issue here, there is zero reason for anyone who doesn't have an emotional attachment to their web browser to actively choose Firefox over Chrome.

 

What other reason matters??

 

my thoughts exactly. Chrome works perfectly fine, it's just that it never lived up to the hype for me. It's just another browser