Hardware acceleration in the browser is quite a popular topic these days, what with Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla all doing their best to harness your GPU. Adobe's been hard at work, too, putting the finishing touches on Flash Player 10.1.
A release candidate is now available for download from Adobe Labs, and it's looking good. If you've got a compatible GPU in your system, watching HD video and playing Flash games should see a significant reduction in resource utilization.
Along with hardware acceleration support, 10.1 is also designed to play nicely with the private browsing modes built-in to all the major web browsers. It's working in Google Chrome, according to NirSoft's Flash Cookies View. My Incognito session left no traces behind from GMail or Home Depot, both of which left Flash cookies behind in my regular browsing windows.
Flash 10.1 brings a slew of other fixes and improvements (including multi-touch support). More info on the release is available in this PDF from Adobe -- I've linked it via Google's web-based viewer.
