The Mozilla Foundation last week outlined several goals for the future of Firefox, the company’s increasingly popular browser; amongst the features discussed: Direct2D GPU acceleration and out-of-process plugins.
Though destined merely for a developer preview in 2Q10, Direct2D GPU acceleration would harness the power of the GPU to render 2D elements like text and pictures. Accelerating these web elements can have a marked effect on the performance of a website, as developer Bas Schouten proved in November with his Firefox 3.7-based Direct2D tests (shown right).
“Although the investigation and implementation are still in an early stage, we can conclude that things are looking very promising for Direct2D,” Schouten said of his results in November.
“Though older PCs with pre-D3D10 graphics cards and WDDM 1.0 drivers will not show significant improvements, going into the future most PCs will support DirectX 10+. PCs in the future could allow providing extremely smooth graphical experiences for web-content like SVG or transformed CSS.”
The Mozilla Foundation also marked out-of-process plugins as not only a priority, but on track for a release. Out-of-process plugin architecture decouples plugins like Flash or Shockwave from the main Firefox process, meaning a crash inside a plugin won’t also sabotage the browser’s stability–the plugin will simply stop running. This architecture will markedly improve the stability of Firefox, and is coming soon to a broad Windows launch, as well as a Mac/Linux beta for Flash only.
While users should not expect Direct2D support in a production release within the year, out-of-process plugin support will begin appearing by the end of this quarter.
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