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#1
I've read about this a couple of days ago. Microsoft isn't really cheating. JavaScript engine in IE9 is just a bit more intelligent, in that it can detect useless code and skip executing it. It's called dead code optimization and the article explains it. In IE9's case, the JavaScript engine has been optimized to do very well in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmarks.
The real question here is that since it is clearly shown that a browser can be tweaked to do well in certain benchmarks, how reliable are benchmarks?