Ok, Microsoft had a slightly more euphemistic way to tell readers of its IE blog that Chrome, Firefox or Safari are not the browsers you would want to use for HTML5 content. The company called it an “undesirable experience”, which is based on the fact that no other browser, with a small exception, currently uses hardware accelerated D2D rendering. Microsoft claims that IE9 can render HTML5 animations 12 times faster than Chrome 5.

Microsoft uses its own Flickr Image Explorer as a showcase of IE9 graphics capabilities. While IE9 cannot hit the same performance as Chrome or Safari in Javascript, its graphics rendering is impressive. In this particular test, IE9’s Platform Preview 2 posted screen refreshes every 0.019 seconds, followed by Firefox 3.7a5 with 0.12 seconds, Chrome 5 (Beta) with 0.22 seconds and IE8 with 0.25 seconds.

The test, however, was not entirely fair, as Microsoft did not enable the available hardware accelerated rendering in Firefox 3.7a5, which is deactivated by default (and can be activated with a few clicks). “We will post comparisons with Firefox’s hardware acceleration when it’s on by default in their beta,” the blog states. Sorry, Microsoft, this sounds a bit suspicious. There was no real reason not to activate it, given that IE9 PP2 has not even a URL bar in its default GUI at this time. Could it be that FF is close to IE9’s performance?

The next Firefox update, version 3.6.4, will not include D2D hardware acceleration. The first likely beta that will come with this feature could be Firefox 4.0 Beta, which is scheduled for a late June release.

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