Apr 29, 2011 13:31 GMT  ·  By
Future Firefoxes should include faster and more reliable hardware acceleration support
   Future Firefoxes should include faster and more reliable hardware acceleration support

Firefox 4 is the fastest Firefox yet and a huge improvement over the version it's replacing. It can also take on its competitor, Chrome, IE, Opera, Safari and put up a decent fight when it comes to performance.

That doesn't mean it can't do better, there are already several projects underway which should end up making a difference, perhaps as soon as Firefox 6. The JavaScript engine is getting an overhaul, but it's not the only one.

Another area which should see big improvements in the not so distant future is graphics and hardware acceleration. Currently, Firefox boasts rather solid and cross-platform hardware acceleration support.

However, hardware acceleration is not on par on all platforms, Windows 7 and Vista fare far better than Mac OS, Linux or even Windows XP, largely due to the use of the Direct2D API.

Mozilla is now designing a new graphics API, dubbed Azure, which would work as the layer between the browser and the various native libraries and technologies. The goal is to create a very light API and one that works the same regardless of the backend it uses.

Mozilla hopes to better integrate Direct 2D, but also offer better support to 3D backends, be them OpenGL or Direct 3D 9 and 10. But if all of this fails, Mozilla wants Firefox to be able to fall back to the current Cairo API.

The Azure API will also be compatible with a multi-process architecture so when the Electrolysis project is finally completed and Firefox will get true and complete multi-process and sandboxing support, the graphics API will be ready for it .

It may be a tall order, but Mozilla is already prototyping the project and the first proof-of-concept demos have been encouraging, as Mozilla's Joe Drew has detailed.

For now, the team working on Azure plans will focus only on the HTML5 canvas element. The first order of business is to have it working with Direct2D, this should be done sometime in Q2 so it could be available by the time Firefox 6 lands.

"We are also in the middle of writing similar canvas backends for Cairo and Quartz, both of which are already in the graphics project branch, but those are not yet operational. We haven’t defined specific time goals for those backends," Drew explained.