HTML5 Canvas Performance

Firefox has promised about a 40% improvement of its performance by march 2012 (even sooner). The browsers war still emulates improvement on their part.

Yup, i've been using Opera for about a decade, but was recently forced to switch to FF nightly (UX-9) for this very reason. That '40% improvement' looks like a conservative estimate based on the JS/canvas demo i ran my cross-browser comparison on. I test and develop on crap hardware for the benefit of end users, but that doesn't mean i should not to run best software available for free. At least that way, if a user says "oh, i can't afford the latest hardware" then a simple link to a nightly build and a friendly ;O) should do it.

PixelRebirth measured a ~40% performance increase across all major browsers, just in the last 6 months! I'm sure more performance increases are likely.

It's been a few weeks. Today I got a new graphics card, a MSI N460GTX Hawk. It's a up-to-date, powerful and supported card. And of course I installed the newest driver (285.58)

To my astonishment Firefox still doesn't care! Under the same testing conditions I still get the same framerates as with the older 9400GS (yes, 8 fps with ghost shooter, 25-32 fps with fishieTank, etc.)

Does anyone also use that model (MSI N460GTX Hawk, 1GB, Talon Version) and Firefox 7.0.1? If so, I'd like to know if you also have that disappointing performance?

I read somewhere that Firefox uses direct2d, which like Ashley mentioned, is only available on vista on windows 7. I don't know if they've upgraded that since then, but that might be the problem.

On xp the canvas is not currently hardware accelerated. It's only accelerated on windows systems with direct2d such as vista and 7.

This probably will not always be the case as Mozilla's eventual plan is to use opengl to do the acceleration on systems without direct2d.

Here's an overview of Firefox's rendering engine Azure:

http://blog.mozilla.com/joe/2011/04/26/introducing-the-azure-project/

And here's a forum with Azure's current progress:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=2233499

Try Chrome 15, that now has hardware acceleration and it might work. If you're on XP obviously you can't try IE9 which is a shame, because that's always had one of the most robust and fastest canvases...

I guess I will have to give Chrome a chance then.

Thank you all very much for the informations, I wasn't aware of the direct2D implementation.

Reading the forum link that ROJOhound provided it seems that there is still hope. Azure will make use of Skia as a replacement of Cairo for all software rendering and OpenGL. Skia is already activated for the Mac versions, and a bug comment from today looks promising. They tested a build for Windows successfully and it seems it will be implemented as another option in the preferences to manually enable Skia, so that people having Direct2D will also be able to alternatively use Skia.

Thanks once again, I wouldn't have learned about it without your answers <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

i was testing this and always used firefox, when offline good framerate

but once online its very slow, was a bit dissapointed, but then ran it in chrome and its blazing fast! ie9 is also on same level, very good

i guess its just matter of time for firefox then

test

hold and release space to shoot

Just a fyi. In Firefox you can click on help at the top and select Troubleshooting Information. That will open an about page with all the relevant info.

The flag for if hardware acceleration is enabled is down near the bottom.

Firefox 8 just came out. Is it any better?

To my surprise ghost shooter runs best in ie

Firefox: 2 fps

Chrome: 12 fps

Ie: 16 Fps

In preview mode it runs really slow on all browsers, though.

Only exported it runs "good"

I just tried Firefox 8 on Space Blaster... seems a bit worse for me :-\ Maybe it's just me though!

Just updated FF to 8.0 and Ghost Shooter still only runs at 12 FPS for me, so no improvement over previous build :(

Firefox 8 just came out. Is it any better?

Sadly no on my xp.

Adapter DescriptionNVIDIA GeForce 6200

Driver Date8-3-2011

WebGL RendererGoogle Inc. -- ANGLE -- OpenGL ES 2.0 (ANGLE 0.0.0.686)

GPU Accelerated Windows0/1. Blocked for your graphics card because of unresolved driver issues.

GPU Accelerated Windows0/1. Blocked for your graphics card because of unresolved driver issues.

Just noticed mine says:

GPU Accelerated Windows 1/1 Direct3D 9

No idea what that actually means, as speed wise, there's no noticeable difference or improvement.