Not trying to detract from Chrome here, but IE9 should have a similar ability:<p><a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/04/09/Benefits-of-GPU-powered-HTML5.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/04/09/Benefits-of-GPU-...</a>
Good - Opera, Firefox, and IE9 are all aready going this route. For Chromium not to support this would be a big thorn in their side, especially with their plans to support native code for extensions (aka, "Chrome Apps").
As exciting as it is for IE9 to enter the next-gen browser wars in earnest I wonder if they are already too late.<p>IE releases are still tied to the years long windows ship cycle, which is a significant disadvantage when all your competitors are on months long cycles. Saddled with such a huge OODA disadvantage as well as all the strategy-tax BS from MS is there any hope?<p>By the time IE9 is actually out Chrome may well have hardware accelerated everything, an LLVM client/plugin model, javascript that runs faster than Java, and client-side Erlang support (or who knows what), with Firefox not far behind. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
Matt Cutts tweeted a design document about the technical details<p><a href="https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/developers/design-documents/gpu-accelerated-compositing-in-chrome" rel="nofollow">https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/developers/desig...</a>
Also Flash 11 is about to support 3D and it looks serious<p><a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20009940-264.html" rel="nofollow">http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20009940-264.html</a><p>Unity3D is at a turning point.
It would have been helpful to have some kind of benchmark to show performance improvements or cpu load reduction.<p>I guess this is more important for advanced features like canvas than regular browsing.