The latest beta of Firefox 4 now comes with support for Direct2D acceleration on Windows, heralding an era of hardware-accelerated web browsers. The code now included in Beta 4 of Firefox essentially alleviates the effort of rendering two-dimensional graphical objects by offloading it from the CPU; a feature also promised by Microsoft for the release version of Internet Explorer 9.

More processor intensive tasks shifted to the GPU translate into additional CPU cycles to handle JavaScript execution and also to speed up other aspects of the browser. This ultimately translates into a much faster browsing experience at the end of the day.

For now, inquisitive users will still need to enable it in Firefox 4 beta manually; the team says it is not confident enough yet to "turn it on for all users." Enabling it should be pretty straight-forward for users who are willing to try beta builds in the first place. Full instructions can be obtained from Mozilla's wiki page here.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at The Inquirer
- check out this article at CNET News
- check out this article at bit-tech

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