Your blanket statement was to the effect that Gecko is always the slowest of the bunch, comparable to only Trident (what specific area of performance you never mention, implying performance of everything). Such are the ingredients of a troll.

Anyway, I've done a stupid thing and compared Opera 10.60 with the FF4 beta (not 3.6.6 as per above poster), just for you.

On my PC, Opera and FF4 are approximately neck-to-neck on the above benchmark, with FF4 having a small but consistent lead of about 10-15%. On zooming in to render in detail, FF's margin increases.

So how about another counterexample:

http://www.galbraiths.org/benchmarks/pixastic.html

FF4B1: 476ms
Opera 10.60: 827ms

Still standing by your claim that Opera is "faster" at everything?

Ok, here's a single counterexample to prove you wrong:

http://web.mit.edu/bzbarsky/www/mandelbrot-clean.html

Try it in the Firefox 4 beta, and compare it to the latest Chrome release.

The reason you got modded down is probably because you made a dramatic, blanket claim without backing it up with facts.

Incidentally, browser performance isn't a simple yes/no issue -- it depends on a number of different pieces of technology. E.g. there's DOM and CSS, graphics, and Javascript. Chrome, for instance, does Javascript overall faster than FF (barring some instances, as above), hence Mozilla's work on JaegerMonkey.

It's clear that graphics alone do not make a good game. But graphics do remain very important in games, especially in 3D oriented titles.

For one, better graphics capabilities give game artists more flexibility in creating the right look and feel in a game. Think for instance how Team Fortress 2's unique visual style has been made possible by the advanced capabilities of modern 3D hardware and the Source engine. While graphics are getting closer and closer to photo-real, many game developers in the future will likely favour a more pseudo-real, stylised look. Why? In order to avoid falling into the uncanny valley.

While there is an obvious trend towards photorealism (this trend is nothing new), many of the best games of this generation aren't quite photorealistic. For example, in GTA IV, while the cityscapes are rendered in a more realistic style, the characters are rendered differently. Even in Crysis, while the environment looks amazingly real, the human characters are ever so slightly cartoony.

But ultimately, your question, pitting the world of Pokemon against Crysis is a bit pointless. It's like asking why people shoot live action film when animations can be just as entertaining. I'm not sure if titles like GTA IV or Crysis or CoD4 would have the same impact if they looked like Pokemon.

No sharks, but this article has a nice picture. Cool that it looks like something from low budget TV sci-fi (except that it's real)