I don't think we do that as a general habit, but that may happen in this case.
HN user
jamesr
The commits are all there, the fixes just might not look completely obvious. We (chromium) commit all fixes to the chromium repository before pushing them to users, always.
In IE9 h/w acceleration and Direct Write are controlled by the document's rendering mode. Hacker News renders in quirks modes and thus uses GDI. Try forcing the document to render in IE9 mode (open the F12 developer tools, hit Alt-9) and the text will look much closer to Firefox 4's. The page layout will also break a bit.
Scooped by 10 years on a 10 year old technology, not 6 months. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1180429
The definitive guide to this was written by then-Mozilla dev Dave Hyatt:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Writing_Efficient_CSS
That's from April 21st, 2000 - almost a decade ago.