Have you used IE in the past few years? IE is (by far) already the fastest browser on my two Windows 10 machines right now. That was also the case when they were running Windows 8 and 8.1 in the past. The latest versions of IE make Chrome feel like Netscape Communicator 4, and they're noticeably faster than Firefox too.
If it had a nice LastPass extension, Ghostery, Buffer, and a few others, I'd probably be using IE as my default browser right now.
Sadly, judging from FF and Chrome both, extensions lead to unavoidable slowdowns. Which makes them a "can't live with them, can't live without them" proposition. Every time I create a new profile, I am shocked by how fast it is. Then the avalanche of ads and tracking pixels forces me to install ABE or uBlock, and the downward spiral begins.
Definitely, that's probably one of the biggest dangers of opening IE up to more extensions. On Windows at least, the divide between Chrome/FF and IE is more fundamental though. Last month, I spent a week really seriously trying to evaluate switching to Firefox or IE, using equivalent extensions (essentially just LastPass, IIRC). Chrome was still awfully clunky compared to Win10's IE TP, especially around touch scroll/zoom/swipe inputs.
Speed is not the mark of a good browser. If you are using speed as your mark, then you have never coded for the web and have never gone through the trials and tribulations of IE. If speed was the target, then Lynx would be the best of browsers.
I agree that speed isn't everything, but switching to IE is often a relief these days when Chrome has managed to spin up my Surface 3 Pro's fan yet again just browsing average sites.
> then you have never coded for the web and have never gone through the trials and tribulations of IE
I've been developing for the web since before any version of IE existed. You?
Speed is NEVER the mark of a good browser. It can be a point on a list but, if it fails to properly implement standards or work in all devices, that's a failed browser. It's not the whole picture.
But you say you agree with my point.
If your Surface 3 can't handle the computing needs of a browser, that's not a resounding recommendation for owning a Surface.
As far as developing for the web, I've own a web dev company for 10 years and, among our list of clients, we manage two web sites you have visited before, one of which you probably visit every week or so. I was also, once, invited to work at Mozilla but declined. Does that answer your question?
So, you're telling me that Chrome running poorly on an i7 processor (while Photoshop, Visual Studio, WebStorm, Firefox, and IE all manage to run fine) is the Surface's fault? It's awfully hard to take any of your points seriously with these lines of reasoning.
Seriously though, everyone I knew who jumped from Firefox to Chrome ~5 years ago did it 100% for performance. We were switching to Chrome for speed even despite it lacking a lot of key features (e.g. dev tools, extensions, third-party cooking blocking, Flash blocking). Speed might not be the only important mark of a good browser, but it is a crucial ingredient.
html5test might not be the best comparison either. They test things that are not part of the official html5 spec. The scoring seems sometimes arbitrary.
On my machine, Chrome Beta channel scores 51% in 52ms and IE TP scores 44% in 41ms. If no browser is even making a passing grade on that test yet, it seems more aspirational than anything.
If it had a nice LastPass extension, Ghostery, Buffer, and a few others, I'd probably be using IE as my default browser right now.