[Splines]

> The workloads Microsoft simulated were held constant for every platform and instrumented via a common command-and-control testing library. It is very much apples-to-apples.

I'm not doubting this part at all.

> The additional telemetry they released is even more confirmation.

The additional telemetry doesn't really tell much of a story either way, given that it's presented as a single chart and little context is provided. Unfortunately there's no link to the data analysis to understand what factors were considered when looking at the data sets involved.

Personally I've found that it's hard to come to these high-level conclusions about performance from large data sets, because users and their devices are so incredibly diverse. It's really hard to draw definitive conclusions given all the data.

It's dangerous to take your data, aggregate it at a high level and look at the results from that point of view - you lose the context under which it was gathered and can come to the wrong answer (for example, browser X is popular in a country with great internet, so page loads are faster, and browser Y is popular in a country with terrible internet, so page loads are slower).