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I'm curious about the change to rendering. It seems to me they're saying, "these OS layout engines (Quartz et al) are too slow - we'll just route around them".

Precisely the opposite. It's our previous abstraction layer that's too slow, and we're replacing it with a thinner one, starting with the easier things like Canvas. See Introducing the Azure project and Azure vs Cairo.

http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2009/11/22/direct2d-hardware-rendering-a-browser

I would say Firefox has hardware rendering, and has it for a while (that blog post I linked to is from 2009 and they were far enough to get performance stats). "Firefox doesn't have such at all" is totally incorrect...

Now where exactly do we see FireFox's VP8 implementation 5 years from now?

Working fine, because it's already working fine. Open, royalty-free video will be dominant on the Web.

Does anybody believe that Mozilla will spend lots of money developing a hardware accelerated implementation for any platform and shove that into the source tree? Would they even accept such a thing if someone else developed it for them? They probably wouldn't do that either, as then they would have to maintain two VP8 codecs... So basically FireFox will never have hardware accelerated VP8, right? They wont use that nice system codec, after all.

Firefox already uses the GPU for video colour space conversion:

http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/04/07/firefox-video-goes-up-to-11

Mozilla already spent money on the development of a hardware accelerated Theora implementation for mobile devices:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/04/theora-on-n900/
http://www.schleef.org/blog/2009/11/11/theora-on-ti-c64x-dsp-and-omap3/

And of course the WebM project is looking to develop GPGPU acceleration of VP8 so Mozilla may not, in fact, need to do anything:

http://www.webmproject.org/code/roadmap/

I understand the appeal of hate, but please at least try to bring some informed hate to the discussion.

XP doesn't have Direct2D.
http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/03/02/presenting-direct2d-hardware-acceleratio

So what if XP was dropped for DX10? Should they be supporting gamers on 98 as well? Supporting multiple platforms costs money, and since XP has inferior security I'm glad they are encouraging upgrades. If you don't like MS then you should be glad they aren't bringing IE9 to XP since it means less competition for competing browsers.

Indeed, after enabling the Direct2D stuff in the current Firefox nightly, MS's Psychedelic demo runs nice and zippy, slightly faster than on IE9 but without sound. (Without the configs set, it runs nice and not-so-zippy: 162, versus 1774 on zippy mode,* for the color wheel on mine.)

So yeah, render speed won't be a problem for FF, especially if they iron out remaining bugs and move the settings out of The Config Page That Might Void Your Warranty.

*If private browsing is porn mode, I say GPU'd browsing is zippy mode. Whoever manages to port The Guardian Legend to canvas or SVG better assume zippy mode unless they want to make a slideshow of those scrolling corridors...

Try a Firefox 4.0 nightly with Direct2D support:

http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/03/02/presenting-direct2d-hardware-acceleratio

I'd be interested to hear how it compares to IE9 and the other browsers on your system.

Is there ANYBODY offering hardware Theora support?

Yes, Mozilla actually:

http://blog.mjg.im/2010/04/16/theora-on-n900.html
http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/04/07/firefox-video-goes-up-to-11

The only chance we have to tell MPEG-LA to shove it is Google releasing the On2 codecs, because VP6 plays nicely on low power and slower devices like this Sempron, and I'm betting VP8 will be even better. Theora is just gonna end up another Vorbis, a teeny tiny niche nobody but a few FOSS geeks use, just like how everyone plays MP3s even though they are patent encumbered.

This is silly. Google has video codecs, not audio codecs. If they release VP8 on an open, royalty-free basis they'll naturally use Vorbis for audio. What's the point of royalty-free video with no royalty-free audio to go with it?

Firefox uses OpenGL as well:

http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/01/18/layers-cross-platform-acceleration
http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/04/07/firefox-video-goes-up-to-11

Firefox uses OpenGL as well:

http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/01/18/layers-cross-platform-acceleration
http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/04/07/firefox-video-goes-up-to-11

Firefox for Windows will also have an OpenGL backend for rendering additional to the DirectX acceleration. it's coming along slowly in steps for various parts of rendering (video scaling, colour conversion, etc) http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/04/07/firefox-video-goes-up-to-11

>I hope that Xwindows does
It does to some extent via XRender and Compositing, but that doesn't mean that Linux browsers are hardware accelerated.

Some info about browser HW acceleration:
http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/01/18/layers-cross-platform-acceleration
http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/03/02/presenting-direct2d-hardware-acceleratio
http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/04/07/firefox-video-goes-up-to-11

>I hope that Xwindows does
It does to some extent via XRender and Compositing, but that doesn't mean that Linux browsers are hardware accelerated.

Some info about browser HW acceleration:
http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/01/18/layers-cross-platform-acceleration
http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/03/02/presenting-direct2d-hardware-acceleratio
http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/04/07/firefox-video-goes-up-to-11

>I hope that Xwindows does
It does to some extent via XRender and Compositing, but that doesn't mean that Linux browsers are hardware accelerated.

Some info about browser HW acceleration:
http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/01/18/layers-cross-platform-acceleration
http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/03/02/presenting-direct2d-hardware-acceleratio
http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/04/07/firefox-video-goes-up-to-11

Microsoft is at it again. Comparing their alpha software to released software all the while forgetting to mention that the competitors are implementing the kind of thing. Hey Microsoft, you're not the innovation leaders here so stop pretending that you are. http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2009/11/22/direct2d-hardware-rendering-a-browser

As I said before, I truly hope Google and all the other browser players 'get it' or we will see a world where IE9 becomes preferred for advanced HTML5 content and will either make IE king again or kill good HTML5 progress on the web.

Firefox is likely to have a release out with hardware accelerated rendering before IE9's release. See:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/04/layers.html
http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/01/18/layers-cross-platform-acceleration
http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/03/02/presenting-direct2d-hardware-acceleratio

As I said before, I truly hope Google and all the other browser players 'get it' or we will see a world where IE9 becomes preferred for advanced HTML5 content and will either make IE king again or kill good HTML5 progress on the web.

Firefox is likely to have a release out with hardware accelerated rendering before IE9's release. See:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/04/layers.html
http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/01/18/layers-cross-platform-acceleration
http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/03/02/presenting-direct2d-hardware-acceleratio

One Windows 7 feature/API/interface/whatever Microsoft has been pushing these days is Direct2D and DirectWrite. (That's two, I know; just play along.) Basically a way to draw vector shapes and smooth text and shit with a DirectX-based COM interface. The text is a bit different from the usual ClearType, because it smooths vertically as well as horizontally.

Microsoft has said they'll use the "Direct"s in IE9* and that they've joined the SVG working group, and have already done vector stuff with VML, so it's clear they want to use the Directs to implement (some subset of) SVG. They got Acid2 working in IE8, so they may as well punch in the SVG stuff used in Acid3; and if they can make a nice, fast GPU-land engine that renders the hypertext and the shapes, IE9 could actually be nice. IE8 can still be slow with pages, such as Wikipedia's often-long list of featured article candidates (though I've tried it now and it doesn't seem as horrible as I remember...hmm), so the GPU stuff may help.

*One of the comments there reads, "instead of focusing on things like: Direct2D and DirectWrite, please focus on better STANDARDS SUPPORT!" I think, and hope, that bort is missing the point.