There was a time when browser benchmarks were actually interesting to look at, when who was on top in Peacekeeper or SunSpider meant something. Chrome burst onto the scene with its muscular V8 JavaScript engine and took browser performance to a whole new level. Opera answered back with Carakan and Mozilla introduced SpiderMonkey, and both stacked up nicely alongside V8. Then Internet Explorer 9 arrived and made it clear that even stodgy old Microsoft wanted to keep pace with the cool kids.

Next, it was on to hardware acceleration (HWA) — and IE9 initially cast a long shadow over its rivals. Other browsers, however, responded with their own HWA code and the playing field levelled out once again. Now we’ve reached a point where browser benchmarks show only minimal performance differences among the top five… and at this point, the question you have to ask is: are such figures even worth comparing?

In a word, no.

Choosing a Web browser in 2011 should be all about the experience. While performance differences are fairly minima, certain browsers still do certain things better than others. Die-hard Windows 7 fans, for example, may want to take a close look at Internet Explorer 9 and its slick taskbar integration features. If you frequently jump between desktop and mobile browsers, Firefox and Opera (and their mobile companions) are worth trying out.

Google fanatics, well, Chrome is probably the browser for you. After all, it integrates with your Google account and it’s the first browser that Big GOOG targets with new features in its Web apps (like drag-and-drop Gmail attachments and desktop notifications from Google Talk). And while it’s not in the top five, those of you who can’t stay away from Facebook owe it to yourselves to give RockMelt a try — its social networking features are unmatched by other browsers.

When performance figures are being compared in milliseconds and scrutinized closely to see which entrant crossed the finish line first by a nose, it’s important that we not let benchmarks get in the way of what really matters. I want to use the browser which best suits my needs and habits, and I’d certainly never switch just so a handful of Web pages loaded a fraction of a second faster.