Mozilla Foundation is working on Direct2D accelleration which will mean that it s Firefox browser will be able to call upon the power of the GPU to speed itself up. While it certainly won’t turn a sluggish Internet connection into a speedy one it will help number crunch all those browser scripts a lot quicker.

The downside is that Direct2D is currently slated for an alpha build, so it probably won’t make it into the release schedule of Gecko 1.9.3. At this rate it will be a year or so before it makes it onto a proper build.

Microsoft has indicated that its forthcoming versions of Internet Exploder will also look to using more of the computer's hardware to speed itself up.