Filed under: Internet, Microsoft, Mozilla, Browsers
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]
I don't know if this is a labor of love or merely the brainchild of four very gifted games designers, but Level Up is a really weird mash-up of gaming elements that you have probably never seen in a Flash game before.
Let's start with the premise itself: Groundhog Day meets Memento. The game experience revolves around 'days': you explore the world and the clock slowly ticks towards the evening. You bounce around picking up gems and talking to the denizens of 'Level Upland'. Eventually you feel tired and head back to ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Dave Forster said 11:04AM on 11-25-2009
cool... just think of all the extra youtube video you can watch in half a millisecond... i want it now!
Reply
Sebastian Anthony said 11:07AM on 11-25-2009
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 Blois said 11:24AM on 11-25-2009
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!!
Reply
Sebastian Anthony said 11:26AM on 11-25-2009
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...
Nick said 11:48AM on 11-25-2009
@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.
nikescar said 11:31AM on 11-25-2009
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.
Reply
nikescar said 11:32AM on 11-25-2009
I meant "without the multitouch" :(
hmm said 11:44AM on 11-25-2009
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
Reply
hmm said 12:27PM on 11-25-2009
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
Reply
follisimo said 1:55PM on 11-25-2009
One step closer to creating Terminators.
Reply
Josh said 1:57PM on 11-25-2009
Would this be Windows only like DirectX is?
Reply
Sebastian Anthony said 2:09PM on 11-25-2009
Very good question... I assume so.
Mike Zachaczewski said 5:08PM on 11-25-2009
Amazing news, is there an expected date that it will be live?
Reply
Grey said 6:30PM on 11-25-2009
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
Reply
hazard said 9:05AM on 11-26-2009
Thanks :)
Truth said 9:38PM on 11-27-2009
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.)
Reply