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making a benchmark specifically to be slower on your competitors browser? Little dodgy.

From everything I've read IE10 apparently is fast, and the numbers are believable from my experience doing similar things (web workers drawing fractal-like images on a canvas) but given that it's the only "pretty" benchmark in the lot, it just seems a little strange.

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I think you misread my post. My point is that everyone optimizes their implementation so that their benchmarks run fast. Furthermore, people pick benchmarks that run fast on their implementation. Neither of these are a 'little dodgy': They are how benchmarks get used.

You might note that they make for bad science, but benchmarks tend not to get used in anything resembling a scientific comparison. Benchmarks get used for comparative testing (did we make thing X faster than it was before?) and to try and prove that your product is better than the competition (in which case much larger lies are going to get trotted out either way).

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