NewsFirefox or Microsoft? Who Will Ship a Hardware-Accelerated Browser First?

Firefox or Microsoft? Who Will Ship a Hardware-Accelerated Browser First?

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Here’s the latest from the frontline in the Browser Wars. Last week at the Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft demoed Internet Explorer 9’s hardware-accelerated graphics, only to have the open source Firefox crew say that they’re working on the very same thing.

Hardware acceleration is kind of a big deal to web developers. Using Direct2D and DirectWire interfaces, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 will give web developers access to the user’s hardware for much faster graphics.

“This is the coolest but least understood aspect of IE 9 we announced,” Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch told blogger Paul Thurrott. “We’ve moved the IE rendering engine from GDI to DirectX.”

However, after the Microsoft demo at last week’s conference, Mozilla Evangelist Chris Blizzard had this to tweet: “Interesting that we’re doing Direct2D support in Firefox as well – I’ll bet we’ll ship it first.”

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