I fear that you are allowing your memory of the past cloud your judgment of the present. I steadfastly resisted IE even in the days of IE 4, where it was clearly superior to Netscape 4. When Microsoft allowed IE to go dormant, my hatred for it blossomed in the same manner that affected many of us here. And today, I will freely admit that I retain leftover bitterness about Internet Explorer. I remain absolutely committed to the Mozilla cause as a result.

And yet I acknowledge that I am closed-minded in my religious support of Mozilla. I have had my bouts of doubt, and most recently wrote about my awe over Microsoft's IE 10 benchmarks [1]. Obviously I want to rationalize the benchmarks as tilted toward IE, but to be honest with myself, I have to admit that IE 10's performance--rendering performance in particular--is quite shocking.

Observing the hardware acceleration of IE 10 on my i7 3770K with a discrete nVidia GPU fills me with regret that I cannot stomach the use of Internet Explorer. I know I am squandering CPU and GPU cycles using a browser that is decidedly less efficient. And simply because I am familiar with my favorite browser's UI and because I like its particular quirks more than the other guy's quirks.

Here is how I rationalize my behavior, though: I love that Mozilla has two competitors. I love that they are being motivated to continuously improve their hardware acceleration (among other things) by attacks on two fronts. I'd like even more competition, but two major competitors will suffice. I feel that the good-natured rivalry between the three major teams is a very good thing.

My fear is that without a sufficiently wide field of competitors, certain areas of innovation will shrivel away. As evidenced by the IE 10 benchmarks, especially those related to hardware acceleration, both Mozilla and Apple/Google have not to-date made hardware acceleration a priority. At least not on the desktop, which is where I do most of my web consumption.

I am hopeful that IE 10's kick in the rear will give them a little incentive to snap out of their complacency. I would love a Firefox build with the hardware accelerated rendering performance of IE 10.

I'm not worried about a monoculture insomuch that the particular rendering quirks of Webkit will be deemed the Holy Standard of the Web. To a degree, that's already the case, at least on mobile. As regrettable as that is, it's not my particular worry. Rather, I am worried about a monoculture because it inevitably reduces innovation, oftentimes in subtle ways that aren't immediately obvious and that we may not be able to perceive because the alternate possible course of history is closed off.

If Microsoft were not pushing the hardware acceleration envelope, evidently no one would be. (Actually, to be clear, we'd simply accept the degree to which Google, Apple, and Mozilla are focused on hardware acceleration to be a reasonably degree of focus because there would be no counter-example available.) And we would probably all consider the rendering performance of Chrome and Firefox to be good enough. "Good enough" sucks, as I have ranted at length about elsewhere. Good enough is one of the worst sentiments in technology.

No, it's absolutely not good enough that the background animation of my blog causes lesser computers to bog down to a crawl (go ahead, take a look and post your complaints). It should not be so computationally intensive to do relatively trivial SVG/SMIL animation in a browser. (Irony: IE 10 doesn't support SMIL, so I can't vouch for its ability to animate my background; what I do know is that it makes the section navigation animation look absolutely effortless compared to Chrome and Firefox.)

I fear the loss of competition because of what that means for innovation. It entrenches "good enough," and I hate that.

[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/lets-all-use-webkit