Much has been said about the use of GPU (graphics processing unit) hardware acceleration in smartphone and tablet web browsers. The general scheme is to offload tasks that would otherwise be calculated by the main CPU to the GPU in your computer's graphics adapter. (For a very detailed article to better understand hardware-accelerated transitions, go to http://www.sencha.com/blog/understanding-hardware-acceleration-on-mobile-browsers.)
GPU can accelerate:
The general layout compositing
All the CSS transitions
The CSS 3D transformations
All the canvas drawing operations
You can create smooth animations with the new CSS transitions pretty easily defining them in your stylesheets or you can rely on external libraries.
CSS transitions are supported in the latest versions of Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. They're supported in IE 10 and onwards. If CSS animations aren't supported in a given browser, then the properties will be applied instantly, gracefully degrading...