there was a thread here that showed how to speed up firefox so I did it..
Yeah, so did I. They actually significantly HURT performance of Firefox 1.0.4 for me. (The pipelining was causing the initial HTML load to time out and stall, so I disabled "network.http.pipelining.firstrequest", which fixed that problem, but I was still getting images that would hang half-way. So I disabled all pipelining options, which fixed the problem, but then Firefox stopped exiting cleanly when I closed it. [the window would close, but firefox.exe would still be running, and I couldn't load another copy until I did an "End Task" on the first one.])
So I just backed up by bookmarks.htm and blasted my profile and started over with defaults plus my own preferences. Much better luck, so far.
Why going to AO takes 13 seconds is beyond me, though. Are you on dial-up? Do you have something configured horribly wrong in your TCP/IP stack? AO takes about 3 seconds total on both IE and Firefox here. No appreciable difference between the two. And no appreciable difference between visiting in WinXP vs Linux (Mandrake 10), other than the 2d Windows drivers for my video card are faster and more mature than the drivers/XFree.org for Mandrake, so Windows scrolls nicer.
And IE scrolls faster than FF, which is especially noticible if you run into a page with those @)%*@#(@_'ing Flash ads all over it. Of course, I usually try to avoid such pages at all costs, so that doesn't really matter to me. It's a trade-off I happily take for a browser that obeys what *I* want it to do. :-)
