Why are people still comparing browser performance?

IE9 is out today and web sites have sprung up benchmarking it against Chrome, Firefox, et cetera.

100 years ago, the lunch time conversation probably centered around who's got the fastest car, and if yours was 38mph and mine was 42mph I get the looks of envy and admiration.

About 50 years ago, people forgot that cars came with a maximum speed limit. Because whatever roads there were, and whatever you wanted to do, every car could go faster than what the other restrictions impose.

Here we are at IE9 on an entry level consumer PC with quad-cores and a billion instructions per second per core, who are these people talking about browser benchmarks, and what are their motives?

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