I have to hand it to IE these days, their performance boasts aren't just lip service. They are definitely outpacing Chrome and FF on canvas performance.

Chrome used to dither between best and second best in performance in the last 4 years, but for some time now IE10 + 11 have been the fastest browsers at rendering 2D Canvas paths/primitives/images by a huge margin.

I develop a canvas-based library and have a series of tests[1] that also serve as a (somewhat practical than usual) benchmark for how browsers compare when using canvas. Here's how long it takes to complete the tests on the big three:

    FF nightly: 17.713 seconds
    Chrome dev: 13.123 seconds
         IE 11:  7.83 seconds

Chrome had an edge when I started out with canvas stuff, now IE is almost twice as fast as Chrome.

[1] you can run the tests yourself here: http://gojs.net/latest/tests/index.html but remember that its only meaningful if you compare results on the same machine.