ReadWriteWeb

Google just confirmed that Chrome will soon support GPU hardware acceleration. Developers can speed up the rendering of complex pages by offloading a lot of the processing to a computer's graphics card, which - after all - was specifically designed for these tasks. As browser developers continue to try to increase the responsiveness of their applications, hardware acceleration is the natural next place to look for performance gains. Microsoft is also working on hardware acceleration for the next version of its browser. The company plans to unveil the first complete build of Internet Explorer 9 next month. Mozilla, too, offers support for GPU acceleration in the latest beta version of Firefox 4 for Windows.

Microsoft announced Internet Explorer 9 at its Professional Developers Conference earlier this month. One of the unique features of IE9 that Microsoft announced at that time was hardware acceleration for its browser. Thanks to technologies like Direct2D and Direct Write that are available for Windows7, Windows developers can use a computer's graphics card to render websites faster. While Microsoft is still working on this project behind closed doors, however, you can already download a Direct2D-enabled pre-release version of Firefox 3.7 today.