So much of any comparison like this is about performance, but I really don't think that's as important as it used to be, and that's coming from someone who generally uses slow computers and optimizes software until they run fast.

I'm typing this on a bit of an exceptional example, a 2.6 GHz Northwood Pentium 4 with 1 GB of single-channel DDR-400 RAM. The one saving grace is that it has an SSD, but I put the swap file on the spinning drive (which is modern). It's running Linux Mint 14, Xfce edition, with a handful of minor OS-level optimizations. Firefox 21, with a fairly standard configuration, flawlessly handles a dozen or more tabs on a daily basis. It's even pretty snappy, more limited by my internet connection (1.5 Mb DSL) than by the hardware it's running on.

If this sorry excuse for a computer does that well, are the relatively minor differences in performance between browsers going to be a big deal on modern hardware? There will be edge cases, such as the people who have hundreds of tabs open at a time, but for the average user I'm having trouble envisioning that.

The things that make a difference anymore are very tough to quantify in tests like Tom's Hardware did. I will always have Firefox around because I think Mozilla actually cares about privacy. I use Presto on my phone because it's the only one I've found that renders things how I want. Many people are tied to a browser because of extensions. Standards support doesn't matter until you find a page where a browser doesn't work, and those pages will be different for different people. Browsers can be rock solid on one computer and worthlessly crashy on another.

I don't think a round of benchmarks has meant anything to me in browser selection for a long time, and when it did I did them myself so as to account for the computer they were running on. I choose by trying to use a variety of them for a while, and a winner always emerges quite quickly.