First Microsoft announced and showed performance benchmarks of Internet Explorer 9, which leverages your GPU to speed up rendering. Playing a so-can-we-game, Bas Schouten demonstrated a Firefox build using Direct2D, the replacement for GDI.

Suffice to note is that competition is good. With Microsoft and Mozilla sparring on another dimension of gaining performance, instead of just the JavaScript engine, we the users can only benefit. As you may know from before, Opera Software is working silent (but deadly?) on Vega, which would introduce GPU powered rendering for at least several HTML 5 / SVG elements. Plans from Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome are unknown, but you can bet they'll keep a close eye on it all.

So what are the gains of using the GPU, through the means of Direct2D, for rendering? Well, looking at the graph on Bas' blog, it can reduce time twice as much when browsing popular web sites such as Facebook, Google and Twitter. There is one catch though, you'll need Windows Vista or Windows 7 and a preferably a DX10+ card.

When Direct2D support in Firefox is included by default, and if it will also become cross platform (with the use of OpenGL) is still unknown, but surely the development of GPU usage is a warm welcome to increase performance overall.