> if you are going to dispute them dispute them with numbers, virtually every benchmark, independent or otherwise puts ie somewhere between bad and embarrassing

1. Benchmarks aren't real world applications. I don't care if it takes 1s rather than 0.5s to run 1,000,000 operations, if all I ever need to do is run 5 of them.

2. The post you linked to is well over two years old. The entire web development world looked very different back then, and the possibilities of using JS and web apps for more serious work were in their infancy. At that point, Chrome did have a decisive advantage over all other browsers (not just IE) in JS execution speed, but of course that's just after Google had incorporated their new JS engine but before any of the more recent Firefox improvements and certainly not taking into account today's imminent releases like IE9.

3. I don't know what all those numbers are meant to mean, because there is no methodology information in the post you linked to. Charts and numbers without context prove nothing, rather like the "infographics" in the original article we're discussing here.

4. Even if you insist on using benchmarks, more recent ones (e.g., those highlighting jQuery 1.5 performance in some navigation features, published a few days ago) have IE9 still slower than other browsers, but more like a factor of 2-5 slower than the orders of magnitude it was just a few years ago. If they carry on improving at the rate they have been since IE7 -- keeping in mind that this seems to be one of their goals, and that the important context here is whether the IE team is following a healthy path for the future rather than whether they are better right now -- then we can expect IE10 to be directly competitive with the engines in other browsers.

As an aside, those few jQuery figures are a great example of the difference between real world usage and synthetic benchmarks. jQuery is a reasonably reputable bit of software, and the difference in performance in some basic document navigation tools -- hardly high-level code, but a step up from built-in JS/DOM functionality -- was as wide between jQuery 1.4.4 and jQuery 1.5 as it was between various pairs of browsers they tested.

> If you point is that we should just be happy with the web that ie6 supports

I've never said anything like that, anywhere in this discussion.

As it happens, I do think the latest HTML5/CSS3 features tend to be more about trend-setting than actually making web development more useful. If you want to make it useful, fire the guy at the W3C who thinks CSS shouldn't have tools like named constants and arithmetic, which web developers have been asking for since forever, and which everyone from programmers to those working in DTP considers entry level.

> Personally I think we are still at an early stage of realising how computing can benefit our lives, for the last 5 years ie has been significantly slowing that progress down,

How is that, exactly? IE has made a small impact in the speed of development of web sites. As we've seen, with competition to drive the market, Microsoft can still develop new browsers, they just chose not to for several years after IE6.

In any case, your point seems to assume that browsers are the only significant means for computers to benefit our lives, which is just crazy. If you want a disruptive technology, look at the iPhone: in just a few years, it has redefined the entire markets of both mobile computing and telecommunications, to the point where it's difficult to find any recent mobile phone that doesn't have a high-res touchscreen or any mobile platform that doesn't support installing custom software applications on the device, helping Apple climb back from relative obscurity in the PC world to one of the largest global brands in the process.

By the way, IE9 supports media queries -- a recent CSS feature that does have current widespread applicability -- just fine.

(Edit: Am I really being downvoted for arguing that qualitative factors and general policies/focus are more important than synthetic benchmarks, when the only quantitative data provided by the person criticising me for not citing hard numbers is one single blog post, from more than two years ago, containing a few numbers based on synthetic benchmarks, with no description of methodology to let us judge what if anything those numbers signify?)