I actually think that all those benchmarks are rather irrelevant for my everyday usage issues. Honestly, what difference does it make whether a website loads in 5 ms or 355 ms? And of course in reality no web site is that fast, regardless of which browser you use. Your system specs (i.e. your processor, whether you use an SSD, etc.) are likely to make a lot more difference for your computing experience.
I personally use almost no add-ons except for Java. I keep flash, but have it disabled almost all the time - actually that alone saves me from most annoying animated ads. There are very few sites that I can think of where flash is actually useful, even YouTube can be accessed without flash these days. So, if I need to watch an occasional video, I turn it on. Otherwise it's off.
In this situation, almost all browsers offer the same features. They all have an address bar, where I type a web address; they all have integrated search - and I should say I actually prefer to keep the address bar separate from the search bar, I don't see how the single bar is beneficial to what I do; all browsers have tabs and some sort of download manager (although even that is useful if you download many files at once over a slow connection). All browsers remember passwords. Privacy issues are now being addressed. So, what's the big difference between them? What are the revolutionary features that make any one of them to stand out from the crowd?
For my taste, the FF offers a better flexibility in dealing with cookies - I can white-list those I agree to keep and automatically erase all others when I close FF. This feature is missing in IE so far - and that's the difference for me.
As far as online banking, FF x64 without flash does very well, even though some banks have flash ads on their websites, which obviously won't work with flash disabled.
Now, what's missing in this discussion is the issue of security. 64-bit browsers may not offer much improvement in terms of speed, but they seem to offer better security, at lest at the moment. That's why I prefer to use 64-bit browsers. Their "slowness" is still nothing I can detect without running a benchmark and typically I don't do that, so I'm rather satisfied with how they work.
