Firefox might beat Microsoft in implementing Direct2D

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Kshitij Sobti

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Posted on 26-11-2009

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In other news -- a falling coconut on the beaches of Chennai has led to the discovery of gravity all over again; only this time in Tamil.

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Internet Explorer with its long release cycles needs to embrace a much more broader vision than just coming to par with current browsers. At the rate IE is moving Google might release Chrome 10 before Microsoft can roll out IE 10.

In the recently released details about Internet Explorer 9 -- which were rather disappointing -- among one of the few improvements was support for rendering content using Direct2D , a new API introduced by Microsoft in Windows 7, which provides hardware accelerated rendering of vector content.

It would seem that the same thought had been brewing in the mind of Mozilla developers, and a few days back, they revealed information about their own implementation of Direct 2D in Firefox, and showcased the performance improvements:

Firefox 3.7 Direct2D

Impressive! And get this, you can download a build of Firefox 3.7 with Direct2D rendering right now!

At this rate it would seem Mozilla will have Direct2D implemented in Firefox -- if not in Firefox 3.7 coming mid-2010, then in Firefox 4 coming later the same year -- quite possibly, much before Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 9, which has no concrete release date yet.