With the release of Windows 8.1 Preview, Netflix now supports streaming over HTML5 instead of Microsoft's proprietary Silverlight plug-in. The caveat is that only Internet Explorer 11, which is bundled with Windows 8.1, supports the necessary HTML5 extensions; if you're a Firefox or Chrome user, you'll continue to use the Silverlight plug-in. In our initial testing, the switch to HTML5 sees a massive reduction in CPU usage -- about one third of Silverlight's CPU usage.