One of the key differentiators that Storyboard, Crank's user interface design and deployment technology, offers is the ability to fully take advantage of the hardware offload capabilities of your embedded system, be it graphic engines, hardware layers or simply hardware blit capabilities.
It looks like we are in good company with our approach ... at least if you ask the web browser engine guys.
The Internet Explorer team is also making an effort to leverage the graphics hardware and GPU capabilities this is interesting though I'm not sure that it will be enough of a differentiator against the WebKit developers who are incorporating WebGL as an graphics acceleration technology.
One area where I see future WebKit optimization, and an area we've explored with some of our customers, is to re-visit the single threaded nature of the WebKit engine. WebKit does have the notion of threads, but its main execution loop is single threaded and typical things like image and script loading, script compilation are somewhat serialized. What the IE team to take advantage of the multi-core systems that are typically available today could be equally applied to WebKit and I wouldn't be surprized to see a surge in the activity in this area.
The good news is that the Storyboard engine is already threaded and though we don't consume much CPU, when you need to parallize your work, we are in a position to help you achieve that.
Thomas