Firefox To Get Direct2D Hardware Acceleration Support

While graphics cards aren’t the first thing you think about for computers that don’t focus on gaming or media playback, it might become more relevant to the casual Internet surfer in the future. Mozilla is currently busy working on coming up with a new Direct2D feature for Firefox, which would offer the popular browser hardware acceleration. In plain English, it could mean that your web browser could use some of the graphics crunch of your graphics card to load media a little quicker. While it certainly won’t turn a sluggish Internet connection into a speedy one, it could help a little bit, and that’d be great if you already have a nice graphics card, right? The downside is that Direct2D is currently slated for an alpha build, so it probably won’t make it into the release schedule of Gecko 1.9.3, meaning we won’t see it in appear anytime soon.