Hot on the heels of the announcement that IE9 would use Direct2D to improve its rendering performance, Firefox have stated their intent to do the same -- and sooner! In a a tweet, Chris Blizzard, an employee of Mozilla, said that Firefox would include Direct2D support -- and he bet it would be shipped sooner than IE9!

Direct2D is a technology included in Microsoft's DirectX multimedia tools. Usually you would only experience the power of DirectX in playing games, but it seems we're finally going to see extensive use of DirectX in office and home use -- the next few months and years will see significant speed-ups to your general computer use and Internet browsing.

Whether this is simply a reaction to the announcement of IE9, or if Firefox had been intending to include D2D support all along, I guess we'll never know. One thing's for certain though, the fast-moving nature of Firefox and Chrome development has played a large part in nibbling away at Internet Explorer's market share.