Firefox Eventually Getting Direct2D Rendering
One of Mozilla's 2Q 2010 goals is to add Direct2D into the next Gecko release.
According to Mozilla in this Firefox projection chart, the latest Q2 2010 goals include partial support for Direct2D hardware acceleration on the Windows platform. This process should dump most of the work onto the GPU and significantly speed up the rendering process within Firefox, a move that Mozilla should have taken after Google released its zippier Chrome browser.
Unfortunately, this feature won't be anywhere near an actual Firefox update for quite some time-- the goal clearly states that Direct2D implementation will be planted in a developer preview (alpha). As Softpedia points out, hardware acceleration may not be included in the Gecko 1.9.3 release, as the web rendering engine will hit beta in June and "go gold" sometime around October. Direct2D may not appear until the end of 2010, or possibly the beginning of 2011.
Mozilla also listed out-of-process plugins in its list of goals. This will eventually pull processes such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, Sun Java and other CPU/memory hogs off the browser's main process. Once implemented, 3rd party plugins will no longer crash the browser on a whole, and allow the user to directly terminate the application (like Adobe Reader, a prime browser crasher).
Surfers willing to check out nightly builds of Firefox/Gecko can head here... eventually you should see some implementation of Direct2D. However, as Mozilla states, the build might crash on startup. "It might delete all your files and cause your computer to burst into flames," Mozilla warns. "Don't bother downloading nightly builds if you're unwilling to put up with problems.
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"It might delete all your files and cause your computer to burst into flames,"
You can't imagine how many of the PC users I support that really believe this is possible, like in the "Olympic torch" chain letter some of them sent me last month.
Video acceleration would be a nice improvement, especially on netbooks where it matters more. Process isolation would also be great although Ubuntu 64-bit users already have that with Flash as it is a 32-bit plugin that uses nspluginwrapper so it shows up as a separate "npviewer.bin" process. Killing it solves Firefox hangs due to Flash bugs without having to kill the browser.
the alpha5 3,7 si much much faster than chrome, thanks to d2d
Im pretty sure the nightly is already using D2D and DirectDraw. How do i know? because im using it right now.
the nightly builds of 3.7 already use D2D and DDraw and it is very impressive if buggy, it improves the responsivness of many pages massivly including flash videos and animations, i have noticed big improvements in youtube HD videos, they render at full FPS in comparisson and suffer from no stuttering they tend to when in regular GDI mode. even thought they talk mostly about the rendering speed of pages but pages with video content and pictures become far more responsive
Its cool that a non-MS browser is using a MS API. Still a big split though... canvas vs d2d. I think until one standard is chosen a lot of developers will avoid either except for novelty purpose.
404 Error on the link.
I just have to say Kudos for the humour... and the straight, to the point last comment too.
"It might delete all your files and cause your computer to burst into flames," Mozilla warns. "Don't bother downloading nightly builds if you're unwilling to put up with problems."
Not unexpected; this is the way IE 9 is going (though I'm almost sure to stick with Firefox no matter who gets it implemented in the final product first). I wonder if, like IE 9, Firefox 4.0 (or whatever version lands with Direct2D) will be for Vista/7 only? Perhaps Mozilla will make two versions, one using GDI+ for XP, the other using Direct2D for Vista & 7? Or maybe one version intelligently switching between the two rendering methods based on the OS and hardware? What a headache for the devs...
Wow, 3.7 Nightly build (Minefield) does direct2d
the nightly builds of 3.7 already use D2D and DDraw and it is very impressive if buggy, it improves the responsivness of many pages massivly including flash videos and animations, i have noticed big improvements in youtube HD videos, they render at full FPS in comparisson and suffer from no stuttering they tend to when in regular GDI mode. even thought they talk mostly about the rendering speed of pages but pages with video content and pictures become far more responsive
True that, esp. with the HD videos thing.
Definitely good to offload as much as possible to the GPU, hopefully GPU D2D performance will get some focus in future driver updates from both sides.
the nightly builds of 3.7 already use D2D and DDraw and it is very impressive if buggy, it improves the responsivness of many pages massivly including flash videos and animations, i have noticed big improvements in youtube HD videos, they render at full FPS in comparisson and suffer from no stuttering they tend to when in regular GDI mode. even thought they talk mostly about the rendering speed of pages but pages with video content and pictures become far more responsive
Are you also using the beta version of the new flash that has video GPU acceleration ? I wonder if the two of them combined will result in some sort of crash... by the way, how long will it still take for Adobe to launch the final version ? they say first half of 2010 but with all the HTML5 video fanfare going on, they might as well deliver something rock stable and fast since they are certainly taking the time to build it.
"It might delete all your files and cause your computer to burst into flames,"You can't imagine how many of the PC users I support that really believe this is possible, like in the "Olympic torch" chain letter some of them sent me last month.
Hopefully, ATI/AMD would optimized their 2D driver before the D2D FireFox release. :?
FF 3.7 stable lol, memory issue plauge FF and Opera browsers although most of the time it's small enough for the avg user to get used to it and ignore it.
Firefox is beggining to show it's weight and age with these pitufully behind schedules. Admittedly, I'm an utter hypocrite in that respect.
Sorry Mozilla, Firefox is becoming way too bloated - startup takes forever when compared against IE8 and Chromium.
Where is the OpenGL love? would make more sense to me sense it support more platforms, might even get them on mobile platforms with OpenGL ES.
Are you also using the beta version of the new flash that has video GPU acceleration ? I wonder if the two of them combined will result in some sort of crash... by the way, how long will it still take for Adobe to launch the final version ? they say first half of 2010 but with all the HTML5 video fanfare going on, they might as well deliver something rock stable and fast since they are certainly taking the time to build it.
No im not using the beta build of flash 10.1 with gpu acceleration, i tried it with and without and you get the same sort of performance for it but i did notice the videos are just as smooth when running D2D but i also noticed that on firefox 3.6 even with the beta build of flash 10.1 the video is still not as smooth as it should be in comparrison but i had to remove it as running it with D2D on 3.7 causes some video corruption when in full screen with HD videos on youtube but using regular 10 with 3.7 and D2D runs perfectly smooth
this would actually be quite nice for netbook usage, i'm not totally worried about my PII 955 as there's plenty of horsepower there, but for much weaker CPU/GPU Combinations this would really be appreciated for offloading that.
No matter what i try, Flash video playback on my netbook, especially when watching a youtube video in firefox 3.6.3 is still stuttery which kinda puts me off
Sigh... Right-click on the firefox shortcut, go to "properties", in the "target" box add /Prefetch:1 outside the quotes of the firefox.exe path. That way firefox will be prefetched - this is the essentially the same cheat IE8 uses to *appear* to load so quickly. The only difference is that IE8's bloat is hidden by default using such cheats.
Sorry, but that Prefetch cheat just doesn't work. (That article was written with XP in mind, but I suppose it would be the same on any version of Windows after XP, too.)
Finally... I wanted D2D support for so long.
"It might delete all your files and cause your computer to burst into flames,"You can't imagine how many of the PC users I support that really believe this is possible, like in the "Olympic torch" chain letter some of them sent me last month.
Except for the flames part, something like this did actually occur during the early Mozilla Phoenix development project. It had to do with someone installing the then RC release and NOT using the default installation directory. The installation ended up wiping out one's entire drive.
Caveat Emptor
ymmv
So i take the cup of gasoline out of my case?