Tumblr 101: Tips And Tricks To Get Started
Sebastian Thrun: Google's Driverless Car
Firefox is going to beat Microsoft's IE9 at its own game
Direct2D is a technology included in Microsoft's DirectX multimedia tools. Usually you would only experience the power of DirectX in playing games, but it seems we're finally going to see extensive use of DirectX in office and home use -- the next few months and years will see significant speed-ups to your general computer use and Internet browsing.
Whether this is simply a reaction to the announcement of IE9, or if Firefox had been intending to include D2D support all along, I guess we'll never know. One thing's for certain though, the fast-moving nature of Firefox and Chrome development has played a large part in nibbling away at Internet Explorer's market share.
[via CNET]
Comments
16
Subscribe to commentsDave ForsterNov 25th 2009 11:04AM
cool... just think of all the extra youtube video you can watch in half a millisecond... i want it now!
Sebastian AnthonyNov 25th 2009 11:07AM
Those milliseconds add up you know!
Over a whole day it might be something like 10 or 20 seconds...
You could treat yourself to a long, languorous urination in that time...
Daniel BloisNov 25th 2009 11:24AM
Does anyone realize as they make animation and text and everything on the web faster - web designers will start using this to make better more interactive websites??? So even if you do not gain much now - you will gain a lot in the future!!
Sebastian AnthonyNov 25th 2009 11:26AM
I thought that was the reason we currently have a really slow Internet? :P
"More FLASH! MORE DHTML! MOOOOORE!!!"
Admittedly, it's better now that we mostly have broadband connections... but still...
NickNov 25th 2009 11:48AM
@Sebastian: Well, you said it. More Flash... Flash sucks, whereas SVG acceleration (OpenVG) existed for years and HTML rendering is much faster.
Flash was evolved from the old FutureSplash animation plugins with ActionScript added some years after.
It still is crap. It was never designed to be extensible or hardware accelerated.
nikescarNov 25th 2009 11:31AM
That photo demo in the pic above is pretty cool. It gives the multitouch feel with the multitouch.
As far as these two browsers go, they have a lot of catching up to do if the want to compete on my PC. Chrome smokes them both.
nikescarNov 25th 2009 11:32AM
I meant "without the multitouch" :(
hmmNov 25th 2009 11:44AM
Opera started work on hardware acceleration in 2008:
Check out the article and the video of Opera running hardware accelerated on this site:
http://my.opera.com/core/blog/2008/06/05/engineering-seminar
hmmNov 25th 2009 12:27PM
Opera started work on hardware acceleration in 2008:
Check out the article and the video of Opera running hardware accelerated on this site:
http://my.opera.com/core/blog/2008/06/05/engineering-seminar
follisimoNov 25th 2009 1:55PM
One step closer to creating Terminators.
JoshNov 25th 2009 1:57PM
Would this be Windows only like DirectX is?
Sebastian AnthonyNov 25th 2009 2:09PM
Very good question... I assume so.
Mike ZachaczewskiNov 25th 2009 5:08PM
Amazing news, is there an expected date that it will be live?
GreyNov 25th 2009 6:30PM
If you go to the original site there's a build with Direct2D implemented
http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2009/11/22/direct2d-hardware-rendering-a-browser
hazardNov 26th 2009 9:05AM
Thanks :)
TruthNov 27th 2009 9:38PM
The straight facts: the Gecko renderer Firefox is using is Cairo, a 2D abstraction layer for rendering to multiple kinds of destination. It already has an OpenGL backend, which should be a lot faster than Direct2D but perhaps it's only in use on Linux?
But the main thing I was going to say was that because it's an abstraction layer, all you need to write is a Cairo backend for Direct2D. Presumably someone on the Cairo project would have been working on this already, and it's not considered as something Firefox themselves would need to write (someone from the project might write it, but the code would still end up in Cairo, not Firefox itself.)