We've spent a lot of time jabbering on and on and on about hardware acceleration in the next generation of Web browsers.

The problem, however, is that no stable browsers have it turned on by default. Unless you're running Firefox 4 beta or Internet Explorer 9 RC, you're probably not enjoying hardware acceleration. Heck, our latest poll shows that almost 50% of Download Squad readers run Chrome, anyway!

Turning hardware acceleration on in Chrome 9, 10 and 11 (stable, beta and canary) is easy, and it can significantly speed up surfing on low-powered devices, like laptops -- or if you're the kind of person who has 30+ tabs open on your desktop PC. We'll show you how to turn on pre-rendering, too, which provides another nice speed boost.

I think the video speaks for itself!

If you can't watch the video: IE9 is some orders of magnitude faster than HTML5 when it comes to hardware-accelerated canvas rendering.

In some other initial benchmarks, IE9 is about 30% slower than Chrome 6 in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark -- and about 10% faster than Firefox 3.7.

I also tested FishIE with Opera and Firefox -- and believe it or not, Opera's a lot faster than both Chrome and Firefox!

Anyway, if you missed the news, IE9 developer preview 3 came out earlier today -- Lee's post has more info, if you're curious, or simply download it now.