HWA is just a gimmicky feature that most of the browsers out there do not need, especially Opera because their software acceleration is outstanding, and could beat FF and Chrome’s HWA in their early stage. Other than some fancy tests out there for features not even 1% of the websites use, HWA is useless right now. Most of the real page rendering speed relies on DOM and JS performance. Opera’s DOM performance is the best, although JS engine could use an upgrade, Carakan hasn’t received a boost in a while, where FF and Chrome keep pushing new boundaries. Opera’s position:fixed bug creates more performance issues than their lack of HWA.
IMO Opera went wrong when they tried to hardware accelerate both the pages and the UI. I doubt the benefits of UI hardware acceleration, and in most cases because they share the same rendering engine, freezes in page freezes the UI which is irritating. Chrome did it right, they went for page acceleration first and now going for UI. Although Chrome’s HWA is buggy as hell anyway.
Instead of focusing on marketing gimmicks such as HWA, Opera should focus on fixing the position:fixed bugs (which is the major reason for extremely slow performance in The Verge, FB and GMail) first. Chrome does not feel faster because of its HWA. Extending HTML5 features, although nice on paper, are not crucial. FF Nightly scores 345, that doesn’t make it a crap browser. Maxthon scores 437, but can not properly scroll in the actual HTML5Test page for its life.
