Could the person who downvoted me elaborate on why he downvoted me? The newest Firefox nightly has Direct2D. If WebKit is "soundly ... beating" Gecko on every front, then one of those fronts would be hardware acceleration. When did WebKit get support for Direct2D?
Webkit has used Quartz on OS X to do accelerated drawing for a long time, and Apple's port to Windows had basic hardware compositing. The GTK+ port uses Cairo for drawing and gets whatever acceleration Gecko would on those platforms. Google wrote a library called Skia to do that on all the platforms they support (using OpenGL directly, Freetype, GDI+, etc.) — it was integrated into mainline Webkit a couple years ago, and is used by several of the forks.
Mozilla is very late to the party. It seems like they're following Microsoft's lead here after they released builds of IE9 that use Direct2D and started dropping talking points about 'accelerated graphics'.
> Webkit has used Quartz on OS X to do accelerated drawing for a long time, and Apple's port to Windows had basic hardware compositing
Quartz Compositor, as the name suggests, can only do compositing. This isn't just compositing. Windows Vista and above and Linux with Compiz also do compositing in hardware -- that isn't nearly comparable to Direct2D, though, because all these solutions render on the CPU.
> Mozilla is very late to the party. It seems like they're following Microsoft's lead here after they released builds of IE9 that use Direct2D and started dropping talking points about 'accelerated graphics'.
It actually isn't. Mozilla started working on Direct2D support before Microsoft announced it, and the newest nightly is easily the fastest and most responsive browser currently available across any platform. It truly is a quantum leap, in that it is going to be impossible for a non-hardware accelerated browser to catch up.
