The Cairo 2D graphics API is one of most critical performance bottlenecks in Firefox today. But it appears that Cairo will soon be kicked to the curb and will be replaced with the much more potent Azure APi in Firefox 7.
“As Firefox 7 has been in the aurora stage for a while now, it’s safe now to say that there’s a very good chance that Azure will be shipping with Firefox 7,” wrote Mozilla developer Bas Schouten in a blog post earlier today. As we reported previously, Azure will be a key component for Firefox to improve its Canvas 2D graphics performance, which are frequently used on websites that use HTML5 techniques.
According to our tests, the Canvas 2D performance of Firefox 7 is up to three times higher than in Firefox 5, while Schouten mentioned that there are still some cases where Cairo performs better than Azure and additional optimization needs to be done. If the Mozilla team finds a major issue in Azure during the Firefox 7 beta phase, the engineer said that the API may be held back until the release of Firefox 8.
At this time, the developers are focusing on creating a Cairo backend for Azure to ensure backwards compatibility as well as a Cairo-wrapper library, which enables Mozilla to use Azure with its original rendering code and then move new code to the development tree to use Azure natively. Schouten also disclosed that the company will begin working on Emerald, which will be a cross-platform acceleration-backend for Azure.
