All right, this is becoming familiar. Most of you have seen those benchmarks that indicate that Internet Explorer 8 performs worse in almost every respect when compared to most recent browsers. Even Opera, which has of late lagged in performance, fares better, and IE8 is also decidedly inferior when it comes to passing the infamous Acid3 test, a rigorous benchmark that assesses the ability to accurately render sites.

So along comes a claim from Microsoft that we shouldn’t fret. IE9, due to arrive at some indefinite time in the future, will close the performance gap. Despite poo-pooing the idea, Microsoft is now admitting that they have found a way to boost JavaScript speeds, and you’ll see the results in the next version of Internet Explorer.

Now as an early reality check, consider that Microsoft’s Acid3 score is presently 24, but they hope to improve that to 32 with early IE9 builds. At the same time, Chrome, Opera and Safari all rate at a perfect 100, whereas the beta version of Firefox 3.6 scores 92.

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I know that when Apple moved from the PowerPC to Intel processors, you could hear and feel the groans around the world. How could Apple possibly abandon the processor platform that made their products the fastest PCs on the planet?

How indeed!

Well, as it turned out, the PowerPC roadmap didn’t favor Apple. When Steve Jobs first demonstrated the original Power Mac G5, he promised there would be a 3GHz version within a year. It never arrived, nor did a mobile version of the chip that didn’t fry the case or soak up battery life in minutes rather than hours.

Apple did the logical thing: They had parallel projects developing Mac OS X for both PowerPC and X86 processors. So if the former didn’t suit their needs, they could switch to the latter without a serious delay. Indeed, the Intel transition began in January 2006 and concluded just eight months later, way ahead of schedule. The main reason for that was that “secret” Mac OS X for Intel project, first revealed the previous summer, although the rumor sites had talked about it for years.

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All right, we know that Snow Leopard will be, for all practical purposes, a wholesale cleanup of Leopard. Most of the surface features, save for Microsoft Exchange support, will be essentially identical to 10.5, although I suppose there might be some refinements here and there.

But the real stuff will happen out of sight, in the guts of the system where the plumbing will be cleaned up, the operating system’s footprint will be reduced, and key performance enhancements will be added. It’ll also support up to 16TB of RAM, which may not mean much to you now, but it might a few years hence.

Indeed, Snow Leopard is laying a foundation that will pave the way for 10.7, 10.8 and beyond, and that is a good thing.

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