Firefox 4 beta gets hardware graphics acceleration

It's available for other platforms too, not just Windows.

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/09/hardware-acceleration/

I expect not. I wonder if those small pauses that appear while I type after keeping this damn browser open (including typing this very message) due to Firefox eating 700MB of physical memory (right now even) will be noticeable even with this fancy hardware acceleration.

If it weren't for Firefox's extension support I'd have dropped this memory-eating leviathan years ago! And yes, the memory leak is present even when extensions and addons are disabled via safemode.

Good link, thanks.

I guess I'm stuck on the 'GPGPU' APIs, because OpenGL is indeed highly hardware accelerated with NV and ATI. So OpenGL certainly ought to be considered hardware acceleration.

MS has a standard API for GPU hw accel that is installed by default in newer versions of Windows.

You could do it on Linux using OpenCL or CUDA or ATI's thing, however these are not installed by default. Also, last time I checked ATI still required specific driver versions for their GPGPU scheme to work.

So Linux is just a difficult target to support GPGPU accelerated programs on.

So much for a reporter researching a story. Firefox 4 will support GPU acceleration on OSX, Linux, Vista, Windows 7 and partial acceleration on XP (only composting effects, no content acceleration).

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/09/hardware-acceleration/

Only windows has HW accel enabled by default, but the code has the ability to use layers in DX9/OpenGL/OpenGL ES as well as a software based fallback.
They just enabled Direct2D because its is the more buggy since the D2D specs aren't even understood by MS staff, just look at the fixes in D2D for Win7 IE9 has been able to uncover.

Personally I might have used directx too for the windows version and opengl for the others. It's no secret directx is where all the effort is put in windows.

And firefox is adding hardware acceleration because ie9 is getting it and chrome and opera and everybody else has been working hard to add it after microsoft's demo made them look bad.

With html5 hardware acceleration only makes sense anyways.

I like firefox, it's been my favorite for a long time. And I think mozilla has much less corporate intent then google or microsoft. Sometimes that's a good thing.

Simples. The Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit organisation earning hundreds of millions, and whose executives are on large salaries, just like all those CEOs of charities.

It's a Microsoft Windows world.

So, Mozilla Corp is just willingly accepting the dictation of market forces.

What ever happened to peace, love, flowers in your hair and all that other hippy shit?

At least MS won't release IE9 for XP because they have the ulterior motive of wanting to nudge everyone toward Windows 7. What's Mozilla's excuse, other than they're far too lazy sitting on their $100M cash mountain to bother with the effort of a cross-platform browser.

It was interesting that Opera took the decision to put a lot of effort and resources into writing their own graphics library from scratch, with hardware acceleration support (currently disabled and waiting for Opera to choose to enable it in future releases). I assume Opera were already planning true cross-platform hardware acceleration years ago (including set top boxes, game consoles and mobile phones, not just desktop Windows and desktop Linux). Apple are doing the same with Safari for desktops and Ipods/Ipads. Firefox has no excuse, agenda or financial limitation to excuse such patent laziness.

1) They are in bed with Microsoft, or...

2) They are too lazy to make their programs in OpenGL since DirectX is much easier to learn (and therefore more limited).

But since they already choose DirectX, it's easy to assume that this particular feature will never be cross-platform.

Maybe in the last decade, when it was FF1 going up against IE6. But Firefox 3 is now looking very fat and slow compared to everyone else, including IE9.

Really, it's sad that they have to resort to hardware acceleration in FF4 to desperately try to keep up with the herd instead of accelerating the performance of their own bloated software and contemplate actually leading the herd for once.

Sadly, that'll never happen. Mozilla just don't have what it takes to out perform Chrome, Safari or Opera when compared like-for-like.

That's why the software behind those browsers appears in various guises (Safari, Chrome, Nokia's browser and the iPad/iPhone all share common bases, whilst Opera has been constantly selected by hardware manufacturers and network operators for over a decade) whereas no one really considers Mozilla for creating their own custom browser or for installing it on anything but Linux distros.

Don't confuse what end users install on their home PCs just because they keep seeing a brand name mentioned on forums like Digital Spy, with success. Google allowed Firefox to exist with its money. If Google decided to take their sugar away again, leaving Mozilla to exist on donations and the presumption that millions of talented programmers around the world are going to contribute for free, Firefox would only manage to sustain the success of the original Mozilla Suite...

Firefox is cross platform, so why did they design the Hardware Accel using Directx, which is windoze only? Why couldn't they use OPENGL which is Cross-platform, runs on all graphics cards, and would suit their cross-platform design? Bad move Mozilla.

Now firefox will be, instead of twice as fast, Four times as fast as Internet Explorer :D

Ok maybe that was overkill.

Its already four times as fast.