Firefox 4 getting Hardware Acceleration soon

[knowledge123]

Some good news for us Mac users

Windows users of Firefox have been enjoying hardware acceleration for a little while now, as Mozilla hurried to keep pace with Microsoft's hardware acceleration in IE9. Without MS to compete with on the Mac, acceleration for that platform took a backseat in Mozilla's development schedule.

But wait! Good news, Mac-loving Firefox fans: hardware acceleration has worked its way back into the plans for the final release of FF4.

Firefox 4 Beta 7, the last beta to get new features before Mozilla locks things down and begins to work on stability, might include acceleration. It's in the nightly builds right now, so keep your fingers crossed that it makes the cut for the last beta!

Unfortunately, there might still be some more work to do: turning on OpenGL -- the graphics interface for the Mac version of FF -- improves load times on a lot of slow pages, but it slows others down up to 6 percent. Here's hoping acceleration arrives in Firefox 4, with speedier load times across the board.

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/09/29/firefox-4-for-mac-getting-hardware-acceleration/

Hopefully they'll tighten up the implementation and get some nice performance gains from it.

More details:

Proposal: Let OpenGL be turned on on Mac for Beta 7 despite talos regressions.
Data: ~90 ms Ts regression that is very hard to impossible to work around (we can't do it asynchronously on a different thread). Proposal: Deal with it in the same way we're dealing with Direct3D 9 Ts regressions, by putting *other* things on a different startup thread.
~6% Tp4 regression (down from ~10%). Proposal: Let it in for now and do everything we can to get it back down.
Reasons this is probably OK:
-We expect this to provide a lot of benefit for some currently quite slow pages.
-We need more testing for this to be in a position to be releasable for b7.
-It's just a switch - we can turn it back off.
Alternative:
-Don't release OpenGL support on Mac with Firefox 4.
-Allow it in post-b7.

Resolution: Let OpenGL in on OS X for nightlies, and reconvene before beta 7 final to decide if we should keep it on for the beta.
Joe to announce this decision as well as talking about the benefits of accelerated layers using OpenGL.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2010-09-28#GFX