Firefox 18 Uses Azure Canvas by Default, for Faster Graphics

Firefox is switching to a new graphics API for HTML5 Canvas, Azure, which is now enabled on all platforms by default, in the Firefox 18 Aurora builds. As such, the older graphics APi, Thebes, was disabled in Firefox 19, which is currently in the Nightly channel.

Mozilla has been working on Azure for quite a while now, since Firefox 4 hit, but it is only now ready to take over from the older Thebes API.

Azure was designed to replace Thebes and provide a simple and cross-platform implementation which should work no matter what graphics backend was used, hardware accelerated or not, OpenGL, DirectX and so on.

Thebes relied on Cairo exclusively, but the new Azure works with Cairo, with CPU acceleration, but also with hardware accelerated backends.

This is a major milestone for the project, but Mozilla is not done yet. The next big step would be to render all the browser graphics through the Azure API.