And the winner is...just who you'd expect

I love vendor performance benchmarks. I always have. They're the IT industry's answer to professional wrestling -- the results are always predetermined, but it's still fun to watch the boasting, the posturing and the crowd reaction.

This week it was Microsoft who booked the match, pitting the not-quite-ready Internet Explorer 8 RC 1 against the already-outdated Firefox 3.0.5 and the version-masked Chrome 1.0 in a best-of-25-falls cage match.

The winner, in a shocker: IE 8.

Last month, Apple was the booker and amazingly the Safari 4 beta won the Battle Royale, defeating Chrome, Firefox and IE 7. Last year, when Mozilla did the booking, Firefox beat Safari and IE. When Google booked the matches, Chrome beat everybody in sight.

Look, let's get real: No vendor publishes a benchmark comparison that it's going to lose. When a vendor doesn't like the benchmarks its competitors are using, it comes up with a new one -- which it invariably claims is more meaningful. The vendor picks who to challenge, too. And -- surprise! -- the vendor's product always comes out on top.

Then the winner struts and preens, the crowd cheers or boos, and in the end it all means...well, pretty much nothing.

Testing Web browsers isn't rocket science. You know roughly how your users use them and what your real-world considerations are. Set them up, test them and draw your own conclusions.

As for the vendor benchmarks, just sit back and enjoy the show. And remember, it isn't really rigged if we all know who's going to win.