There have been leaps and bounds of progress in the last few years. Youtube hardware acceleration works perfectly in chrome/firefox now (assuming you have working video drivers).
As far as I know netflix still limits you to 720p under most browsers (although their support page shows that opera of all things supports 1080p)
As far as I know netflix still limits you to 720p under most browsers (although their support page shows that opera of all things supports 1080p)