Today, Microsoft released the third installment of Silverlight, its competitor to Adobe Flash a day earlier than anticipated. The official introduction of the updated framework is scheduled to take place later today at an event in San Francisco.

According to Microsoft, Silverlight 3.0 features hundreds of new improvements and can be found running on thousands of new APIs. Most notably, it features hardware GPU acceleration and hardware compositing, perspective 3D, bitmap and pixel API, pixel shader effects, and Deep Zoom improvements. As an addition, it features new codec support for H.264, AAC, MPEG-4, raw bitstream Audio/Video API, and improved logging for media analytics. In other words, the time has finally come to put your idle GPU configuration to use in rich media interactive web pages running on Silverlight.

One of the other notable features of the new framework is that it includes multi-touch support . This is a really sexy way of Microsoft promoting its upcoming Windows 7 operating system (the first to natively support multi-touch) in that it will enable users to interact with web-based content in ways that have only been seen on the movie screen.

Similarly to the psychological phenomenon known as an out-of-body experience, Silverlight 3.0 supports out-of-browser experiences.  Silverlight applications can be installed locally on a machine for offline access where they run outside the browser. They can be launched using the Start Menu or desktop shortcuts, and can run without any open browser windows. Additionally, applications can check whether they are running inside a browser or not.

There are plenty of new highlights to the third installment of Microsoft’s cross-platform web app framework, but we encourage those who want to learn more to check out the Wikipedia page here.

Microsoft Silverlight 3.0 can be downloaded here.