> 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.

You are clearly forgetting where the web in general is going to. Browsers today serve as a wrapper to applications and NEED to be fast. Not a single web application today uses only 5 or 10 or 50 operations.

> IE has made a small impact in the speed of development of web sites.

IE has made BIG impact in the speed of development. The fact that it has not kept up with other browsers only made that worse.

Even IE8 rendering and its javascript engine have problems. Those are not present on modern browsers and it obviously impacts development because IE needs to have specific testing and specific coding (mostly workarounds).

Did you expect other browsers to be like IE, so that we could have a "standard" on not having standards?