Woah, am I the only one who loves the work that has been done with IE9? Their new rendering engine is sick, Microsoft must have stolen personal from their DirectX team to work on it. Everything is hardware accelerated, the anti-aliased fonts look great, Flash video playback of 1080p uses just a few percents of CPU, something that max out a whole core for me in FF or Chrome. Same thing with moving / fading / modifying elements with JQuery.animate(), super smooth and uses almost no CPU.
I'm still a die-hard fan of Firefox because of all the plugins, but damn I wish everyone were using rendering engines as good as the one in IE9. I hope FF and Chrome will close this gap soon.
In chrome you can go to about:flags and enable GPU accelerated rendering. That's in the stable builds, in beta or dev builds it may well be on by default now.
Unlike on OSX, IE can only use publicly disclosed APIs. Anything IE can do, Firefox can also do in Windows. On OSX Safari can, in theory, access acceleration that no one else can. Although I don't know if they do.
I'm still a die-hard fan of Firefox because of all the plugins, but damn I wish everyone were using rendering engines as good as the one in IE9. I hope FF and Chrome will close this gap soon.