Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 26th Nov 2009 00:09 UTC, submitted by Cytor
Mozilla & Gecko clones A few days ago, we heard about Microsoft planning to include Direct2D acceleration in the yet-to-come IE9, thus leveraging today's poweful GPUs to render web content. Mozilla didn't fall behind: last Sunday, Firefox hacker Bas Schouten revealed a build of Firefox 3.7 with built-in Direct2D acceleration on his blog. His performance tests claim that popular sites like Facebook and Twitter render twice as fast compared to Firefox without Direct2D rendering. More complex sites do not see a lot of benefits, tough. This build requires DirectX 10 and a WDDM 1.0 compatible graphics drive, and thus, Windows Vista or 7. Download it here.
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RE[6]: Comment by kap1
by segedunum on Sat 28th Nov 2009 13:51 UTC in reply to "RE[5]: Comment by kap1"
segedunum
Member since:
2005-07-06

Even when linux and osx get similar features working its not like they can share the code.

Well, no they can't so there will be code divergence, maintenance issues and Linux and OS X inevitably won't get feature parity.

Your just denying your windows users a great feature so the the guys on linux won't get jealous.

No. If you're going to have a cross-platform app then do so. If not, just admit to everyone that it isn't. Simple.

And don't forget that windows is still the biggest chunk of the market, making your windows version stagnate so linux can catch up just can only lose you users.

I couldn't give a shit. If an application is cross-platform then it's cross-platform. No, you don't have to lose users. With a proper cross-platform development framework then it's more than achieveable, and it then makes a limited amount of platform specific features possible and easier to maintain.

Also if you limit your cross-platform app to the lowest common denominator features you end up with app that under performs on all of them.

See above. You don't have to. That 'lowest common denominator' thing is just plain crap. The problem is that Firefox is doing it wrong.

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