Mozilla adds GPU acceleration to Firefox 3.7 alpha

 

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Posted on 30 Nov 2009 at 15:24

Although Firefox 3.6 hasn't made it out of beta yet, Mozilla has already made Firefox 3.7 alpha available on its FTP servers. With it comes support for Direct2D rendering, which enables the browser to take advantage of your PC's graphics card to dramatically speed up loading times on complex websites.

Firefox 3.7 alpha is currently codenamed 'Minefield' for obvious reasons (stability, or lack thereof, in particular) and isn't intended for mainstream computer users, but it does give us a glimpse of what the web could look like in the future.

"A while ago I started my investigation into Direct2D usage in Firefox," said Firefox developer Bas Schouten in a post on his blog. "Since then we've made significant progress and are now able to present a Firefox browser completely rendered using Direct2D, making intensive usage of the GPU."

Schouten said that not only were web pages rendered using the GPU, but also the UI and menu bars. Despite this though, there isn't much in the way of aesthetic change from existing versions of the Firefox browser.

Despite this, he did give an indication of how well the Direct2D accelerated browser would perform across a range of popular websites. Google and Facebook load times were cut in half, while Twitter load times were closer to two and a half times faster than a CPU-accelerated version of Firefox. Other sites - including YouTube, Wikipedia and Slashdot - didn't see quite as much of a benefit, but there were still slight improvements in performance.

Schouten was running a fairly mid-range system by today's standards, featuring a Core i7-920 processor and a Radeon HD 4850, which goes to show that slower systems (most laptops, for example) may see even bigger performance improvements. Of course, it's going to be dependent on how well Direct2D harnesses the power available on current graphics cards, but it's nevertheless promising.

The improvements don't look massive when we talk about absolute performance since we are talking about a few milliseconds here, but the thought of having search results delivered even quicker is a tantalising thought. We're still going to be limited by how quickly servers can send web pages to us, though.

Author: Tim Smalley