Comment by jeroenhd

I don't know the current status of web browsers, ut hardware encoding and decoding for image formats is alive and well. Not really relevant for showing a 32x32 GIF arrow like on HN, but very important when browsing high resolution images with any kind of smoothness.

If you don't really care about your users' battery life you can opt to disable hardware acceleration within your applications, but it's usually enabled by default, and for good reason.