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’ve been extremely hard on Microsoft in recent years. First, I’ve criticized them for their bait and switch and other shady marketing schemes, and then I’ve even gone so far as to suggest they are doomed to fail big time in a few years.

I don’t think many of you agree with me about Microsoft’s potential for future irrelevance. After all they still have billions in the bank, and they make huge profits on their software. All right, they are laying off 5,000 people, but maybe they were simply overstaffed and used the state of the economy as an excuse to dump unproductive workers.

But I’m quite serious about what I say, and I think Microsoft’s sordid history is sufficient to warrant some close scrutiny by the authorities. We in the states shouldn’t depend on the European Union to do the heavy lifting when it comes to fining Microsoft for various and sundry offenses.

Sure, the Department of Justice also clamped down on the company more or less, but the regulation-free environment of the Bush administration probably lessened the penalties. For example, efforts to break up the company were quickly abandoned.

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The other day, in responding to less-than-serious email from me on the subject, an acquaintance reminded me how hundreds of millions of people use Windows around the planet. To his way of thinking, that’s because they preferred that operating system over the Mac OS or Linux.

Well, that may be true in part. But history shows that Microsoft has not dominated a market by building superior products. In large part, they used bait and switch and other deceptive tactics to push their mediocre imitations to customers.

In the early 1990s, for example, when several advanced operating systems were available or being developed, Microsoft said that they were working on their own, Cairo, which would be far superior, so there was no reason to choose an alternative to Windows.

Cairo, however, eventually vanished from Microsoft’s talking points, simply because it was all an illusion. Maybe they did at one time have hopes for such a thing, just as they actually planned to add an advanced file system to Windows Vista. But neither ever saw release. In the case of Vista’s Win FS file system, it appeared in beta versions, but was pulled for further development. No, it won’t be in Windows 7 either.

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You no doubt heard the report the other day, about someone cracking Apple’s Safari in just a few minutes and taking home $5,000 for their efforts. What you didn’t know, until you read the fine print of course, is that this particular person spent weeks investigating possible security flaws, and, no doubt, rehearsing the routine so it would go off without a hitch in a public presentation.

Since all software has potential security lapses, about the best you can say for this sort of exercise is that the performance was good, and maybe there ought to be an Oscar for so-called security experts who can demonstrate their skills in public with the appropriate level of bluster and efficiency.

Not mentioned in those headlines is the fact that Microsoft’s browsers also succumbed to security breaches in short order, but then you expected that right?

So, no, you don’t have to order some security software to protect your Mac. At least not yet. What is unfortunate, though, is that by crying wolf on a regular basis for the past eight years, if and when a real threat does arrive, few will believe it’s for real. That’s the real tragedy of all this headline-grabbing behavior.

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