Direct2D/DirectWrite Accelerated Rendering For Firefox

[iceccold]

Same here.

[Elen]

They say there are certain bugs in directwrite that affect FF (eg. some text rendering and some font caching bugs) and will be fixed by MS.. But if they update DW will it come in a form of a windows update or will it be a manual DL? Don't think I ever recall DW/DX ever being updated by windows (atleast not post XP).

It will be fixed either by windows updates or service packs. Mozilla unfortunately can't fix it themselves.

It's not going to be fixed by Microsoft, they worked around the issue in IE9 (it has vastly superior text rendering now) and Mozilla would have to do the same, see: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mswanson/archiv ... ality.aspx

[Omega X]

It's not going to be fixed by Microsoft, they worked around the issue in IE9 (it has vastly superior text rendering now) and Mozilla would have to do the same, see: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mswanson/archiv ... ality.aspx

IE9 does not workaround the issue. It disables DirectWrite/D2D when in Compatibility Mode. Its quite easy to reproduce the same font issues in both Fx4 and IE9 with a neutral page.

Its in Microsoft's best interest to fix it or they will delay their own plans to replace GDI+ with it.

[rob64rock]

It's not going to be fixed by Microsoft, they worked around the issue in IE9 (it has vastly superior text rendering now) and Mozilla would have to do the same, see: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mswanson/archiv ... ality.aspx

IE9 does not workaround the issue. It disables DirectWrite/D2D when in Compatibility Mode. Its quite easy to reproduce the same font issues in both Fx4 and IE9 with a neutral page.

Its in Microsoft's best interest to fix it or they will delay their own plans to replace GDI+ with it.

What you say may be true, but the article was comparing font quality with some browsers without HWA. They were just showing off what IE 9 could do and if it was the case of "Incompatibility Mode" the screenshots in the article would had the same fonts quality. They compared it with Firefox 3.6.8, not even with the most recent Firefox 4 Beta. If they had it would of most likely looked the same as IE 9 screenshot, since the Directwrite bug is present in both.

[Omega X]

The article was irrelevant in the argument, so I didn't comment on it.

[squall_leonhart]

IE9 doesn't use DirectWrite for the GUI either.

[supergirl260]

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Perfo ... ault.xhtml


any idea why this test doesnt do as well as ie9 by long short or chrome and what bug number it is

[Mark342]

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/SantasWorkshop/Default.xhtml


any idea why this test doesnt do as well as ie9 by long short or chrome and what bug number it is

This test animates inline SVG elements.
IIRC, Firefox doesn't hardware accelerate SVG and Chrome only accelerates canvas + compositing.
There wasn't enough time to hardware accelerate SVG in Firefox 4.

[supergirl260]

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/SantasWorkshop/Default.xhtml


any idea why this test doesnt do as well as ie9 by long short or chrome and what bug number it is

This test animates inline SVG elements.
IIRC, Firefox doesn't hardware accelerate SVG and Chrome only accelerates canvas + compositing.
There wasn't enough time to hardware accelerate SVG in Firefox 4.

ok thanks do you know bug number doe so i can track it

[NVD]

Nvidia has released the new Release 265 series drivers with GeForce 266.35 beta drivers, please test them with Direct2D and DirectWrite.

Desktop drivers
http://www.nvidia.com/object/win7-winvi ... river.html

http://www.nvidia.com/object/win7-winvi ... river.html

Notebook drivers
http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook-w ... river.html

http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook-w ... river.html

[dbcooper.dk]

Back in November I had the following exchange with Joe Drew on his blog:

http://blog.mozilla.com/joe/2010/11/10/ ... /#comments

dbcooper Says:
November 10th, 2010 at 2:43 pm

DW font rendering is very poor in FF4 nightlies. Will this be fixed for the FF4 release? Will Cleartype rendering be available through DW or with D2D?

Joe Drew Says:
November 10th, 2010 at 2:47 pm

ClearType is already available via DirectWrite, but sometimes we can’t use it because of technical limitations that we’re going to solve for Fx4 final.

From today's platform notes:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2011-01-04

Preliminary support for hardware-accelerated ClearType (subpixel anti-aliased text) has landed.

Currently only works for Direct3D 9, which is incompatible with Direct2D.
Pending work enables it for Direct3D 10 and OpenGL (Mac).
Net of this: much less frequent jaggy/gross looking text.

With any luck cleartype will be used with D2D/DW acceleration soon.

[WonderCsabo]

Stay tuned for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=612846 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=622482

[Soulburner]

After a few weeks of using Fx4 nightlies with D2D enabled, I thought I got used to the new font rendering. But because I like to design websites from time to time, I had to launch Opera and Chrome. And to my surprise, I was shocked to see how sharp standard ClearType is! The difference was so big, I turned off hardware acceleration in Fx4, but turned it back on after I experienced how slow Firefox is without it

So, as a supporter of D2D/DWrite font rendering... I must withdraw my support ClearType must return!

[NVD]

Microsoft has released a new update, KB2454826. In this update, according to the KB article, D2d1.dll, Fntcache.dll, Dwrite.dll, D3d10_1.dll and D3d10_1core.dll is updated to version 6.1.7600.20830, newer than what the old KB2028560 update installs. Windows 7 users might want to test this update.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=2454826

32bit
http://download.microsoft.com/download/ ... v2-x86.msu

64bit
http://download.microsoft.com/download/ ... v2-x64.msu

[KWierso]

Those updates really do help.