GPU accelerated rendering lands in Firefox nightly build

There will be some similar OpenGL rendering implemented but not quite to the same global scope as D2D

What they're going to do is segregate different types of content in to layers and then accelerate what parts they can. See this bug for more information:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=534425

You don't need a DirectX11 card, but you do need Windows 7 or Vista SP2 + Update Pack (for neither DirectWrite nor Direct2D are present in Directx10)

As you may or may not be aware, that propblem was fixed long ago and developers have been working hard on improoving startup time.

But it's open sources, patches are always welcpme.

Damian -- if you're going to be patronizing, you should at least have some semblance of a clue what you are talking about.

If you consider startup times many times longer than Chrome or even IE to be "fixed" then yes, it's fixed. In other words, no, it's wasn't fixed long ago. Nor is it fixed today, as I'm reminded every time I revert to Firefox for some site that doesn't work in Chrome. I can demonstrate *right now* that it isn't fixed.

As for your comment about open source: well, more stupid comments have been made about the nature of open source, but not many. As you may or may not be aware, very few people contribute code to open source projects. One good reason is that very few are qualified to do so. Technical skills aside, very few people understand the code base well enough to competently fix a problem of this nature. Even if some random schmuck on the internet submitted an alleged fix, do you seriously thing that the project commiters would accept it without having to do about as much as validation as if they'd fixed it themselves.

I'm sure you have your reasons for caring about something as meaningless as startup time, just as you probably having reasons for being a cock in response to Damian's seemingly innocuous comment. However, I run the long since abandoned Firefox Preloader and after the initial load, I get blazingly fast start times.

You can whine about start times all you want, but I don't care much about it, as long as my browsing experience is good. It's similar to the people who jump on the instant boot band wagon, only to realize they have to work out of a crippled OS. If it takes long to start, that's annoying, but the true test is how does it work once it's started.

@mah: I'm sorry that your reading skills are so limited that you thought Damian's comment was "innocuous" as opposed to (a) wrong and (b) patronizing. What are you, his alt or his mother?

I'm happy for you that you don't care about startup times. I do, as do the many otherpeople who contributed to the bug thread over at mozilla. If it takes longer for Firefox to start up than I actually spend looking at a site such as gmail, google maps, etc., then something is clearly up.

I'm going to take a wild guess: you're a programmer, right? And a relatively inexperienced one, who hasn't yet grown out of the "if it works for me it must be fine for everybody else; users who have problems must be doing it wrong" stage.

Carl, I'd direct you to https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects/Startup_Time_Improvements for a recent summary of startup time optimizations made in Firefox.

Several person-years of effort have gone into speeding up start time, on all platforms, on "warm" and "cold" systems, in the last twelve months.

@Mike: Thanks for the pointer. Yes, I don't doubt that lots of people are poring over this and that lots of people at Mozilla do in fact take startup time seriously (unlike our friend earlier in the thread...) and recognize that with the rise of netbooks, smartphones, MIDs, and other low-powered platforms, this is going to be critical.

And I'm glad that the seed randomization bug in particular https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501605 is marked as fixed (although to be honest I'm not totally convinced: in my crude benchmarks, clearing down the IE temporary files still seems to have a significant effect on startup).

But unfortunately it remains the case that Firefox still starts up significantly slower than either IE8 or Chrome 4.0 -- we're looking for a 50% to 70% reduction here, not shaving a few points. And that's sad because in every other respect it would be my preferred browser: Chrome still has issues on a lot of websites and IE, well, is IE.

Incidentally, one dumb-sounding but easy and surprisingly effective thing that could be done is to put *something* -- even if its just a splash screen or a "loading..." bar -- on screen during startup. People will perceive the delay to be more tolerable if they can just see reassurance that something is happening. (Compare for instance Photoshop, another slow-to-load application that provides a "running commentary" on what's taking so long; or even the Windows XP boot screen with the rolling dots).

This might also reduce the scenario I've seen frequently with inexperienced users where they mistakenly think that Firefox isn't loading, so they launch 2, 3, 4... copies...

@Carl: http://ilias.ca/blog/2005/09/splash-screen-for-firefox/

Thanks, that is (a) awesome and (b) exactly why I wish I could use FF full time