Mozilla glares at Microsoft, chews on Direct2D graphics cud Mozilla has proclaimed that the race is on to beat Microsoft to the post in its efforts to insert Direct2D support into the next version of its Internet Explorer browser. Over the weekend, Mozilla programmer Bas Schouten wrote a lengthy blog post about how he had successfully loaded Direct2D support into an alpha build of …
If that was the case then Opera would already be rendering CSS attributes like border-radius and column-width (already present in Firefox and WebKit-based browsers). Of course, I do expect that Opera will add these several years before Microsoft finally get around to implementing them (badly or inaccurately) in IE...
interesting that Moz probably hadn't even thought about doing this until Sinofsky stands up and talks about it.
It's like Ajax ... MS added the XMLHttpRequest stuff for Outlook Web Access but didn't coin a snappy name.. now everyone else takes credit for it.
MS may be slow off the mark to get code out there (but as recent IE vs Firefox security test show...when they get their head in the game they produce good stuff) but they should at least get some credit for the ideas flowing from Redmond
I can't possibly see how D2D will be anything but a checkbox feature for the nearby future with the gecko render engine. Firefox screen drawing speed is not the issue but the bloated slow parsing and rendering gecko engine is. I keep hearing how fast it is going to be but right now 3.5 is damn near IE slow.
"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+."
So DirectX is being ported to Unix, Linux etc? Wow.
Tell me now, why do I need Direct2D for a browser? And will anything be back-ported to XP?
Hmm...another reason to look at the Linux migration again in a few months; or just buy Win7.
...I believe M$ made the statement & then Mozilla said we've already got it running in Alpha. How do figure your statement out. That would mean that Mozilla programmers have only just started on this & done it in brilliant time. I don't doubt that they're brilliant, much more so than M$ programmers, but the truth is I figure they've been working on it, M$ found out & mouthed off first. Mozilla progs were more likely following Opera's lead rather than M$.
"while Microsoft has only just begun work on IE 9 and hasn’t yet revealed when that iteration of the browser will rock up."
Why did I read that as "... that iteration of the browser will cock up."?!
Probably because they have yet to release a browser I don't have to fudge and hack CSS to work with properly.
Wah? Microsoft built the OS and only just put this feature into the latest versions of Windows and you're praising them for coming up with the idea to use their new feature first? Aside from that, I cannot find any indication that Mozilla got the idea from IE9 as they announced they were thinking of using it 8 days before IE9 was announced.
I'm sure there is plenty Microsoft does do that deserves praise but being the first to think of using their own code isn't really much of an accomplishment.
Have I just been trolled?
So what are they doing to remain cross plaform?
They going to just use the Wine DirectX code to shoe horn it into the Unixs?
Are they going to use some abstraction above DirectX that can be something else on Unixes?
Are other platforms going to be left un-GPU accelerated?
Don't use MS platform specific API directly unless you really have to or the app is never to be ported. DirectX isn't even pretended to be cross platform (like Win32 was (see Wise) or .NET is now).
We will have to see what is actually released, but I would like a mozilla statement to clarify what they are doing. Damn, I liked mozilla and firefox........hope they aren't going to let us down.
.deb packages The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
