> 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 th

> 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. QuartzGL, which is somewhat nearer to D2D in intent, still isn't enabled by default, even on Snow Leopard. http://www.tapper-ware.net/stable/web.dom.stresstest.transform/ http://www.tapper-ware.net/stable/web.dom.stresstest.transfo... is a good example of what's possible with true hardware acceleration and not just compositing: http://www.tapper-ware.net/files/stresstest.comparison.ogg http://www.tapper-ware.net/files/stresstest.comparison.ogg shows how it performs on different browsers in Windows. Pretty stark difference, don't you think? > 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.