If you’ve enjoyed mucking around with the beta builds of Firefox 4, you might want to pay close attention to the next release. Slated to drop on Monday, Firefox 4 beta 4 will enable hardware-accelerated graphics for some Windows users. As CNET explains, “Hardware acceleration […] is designed to shift some tasks from a computer’s main processor to its graphics processor. One way Firefox is tackling the technology is by using Windows’ Direct2D interface, which can speed up the display of text and graphics on newer versions of Windows.” The feature will be off by default, but you can enable it by:
- Entering about:config in the Firefox Awesome Bar
- Accept warning asking you to “be careful.”
- Search for mozilla.widget.render-mode and set its value to 6
- Search for gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled and set its value to true.
The ability to group tabs into “tab sets” is also scheduled to be available in beta 4. Anyone out there using Firefox 4 beta as their primary browser?
