Think what the latest game engines can do at 60fps, why oh why do our browsers still sweat over a few alpha channels in 2011?

EDIT: My galaxy S phone runs Quake 3 at 60fps, flawlessly. MY PHONE RUNS QUAKE 3! Why can't my browser do alpha blending at more than 10fps?

Browsers have this little thing they have to deal with called "text". Turns out that stuffing reasonable text into a texture and then scrolling it, say, is not something GPUs can do a good job of. This is why games just bitmap all their text and it looks like crap, by the way. I doubt you'd want text in a browser to look like it does in most games.

Browsers are working on making this faster, by the way. But it also turns out that not only are GPUs designed around stuff that games do (which is not the same set of stuff that browsers need done), but so are graphics drivers. The parts of them that Firefox 4 has been trying to use are clearly undertested, because they're ... rather buggy. Which is why there's now a driver blacklist (whitelist on Linux) and so forth...

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=4&v...

Tesselation, volumetric shadows, depth of field, etc. Can you really say with a straight face that it's not doing anything complicated? And here we are struggling with drop-shadows. I know the problem domains are different, but I can't help but feel completely underwhelmed at the current state of the web when it comes to graphics. Somehow I think there's more to it than "fonts are hard."

At which point we've reached the end of my second-hand graphics knowledge, unfortunately. I wish I could give you a better technical explanation here...

ie: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/03/16/internet-explor...

ff: http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/09/firefox-4-beta-5-brings-g...

Once again, microsoft's decision to deliberately stagnate the browser market making life difficult for us all.

Also - to specifically counter your point IE9 will have hardware accelerated rendering via Direct2D: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2009/11/18/an-early-look-...

Obviously this did not prevent other people doing GPU-acceleration, but the leading player deliberately halting development will and did cause the market to stagnate.

Scrolling was very jittery in general and page rendering/painting was also slower. Not like molasses slow but definitely not acceptable for a Core i7 machine.

With Win 7 which uses only one GPU, the Nvidia one, it is very smooth and fast as I said - definitely wouldn't want to go back.

(Is the difference between Chrome and Chromium likely to be relevant?)

This was repeatable several times at first, but now it's become intermittent. It takes me back to the days of tweaking settings in X-Windows, when there was a "saveunder" setting that would specify whether to retain the contents of a window in memory when it became obscured by another window.