It's more about other browsers beginning the rendering process sooner and also taking advantage of human perception of time than it is about actual speed and Mozilla are working on exploiting perception like other browsers in future versions as well as making it faster to compete with Safari and Chrome (it's main competitors in speed, both of which use webkit).
At 11/15/09 10:28 AM, Soaked wrote:
Switch to Google Chrome. It's also an open source project(Chromium), and powered by Google, so the project is being pushed faster. Firefox doesn't seem to be moving as fast as Chrome too, project wise. Chrome has a simple, and efficient UI, and is really fast at starting-up, and loading pages.
Firefox is open source and uses Gecko as it's engine which is open source as well. It is also developed by a community as well and like Google Chrome anyone can contribute. Firefox is updated daily like GC, but unlike GC there are no pre-built weekly or quarterly versions for Firefox, you have to build them yourself.
Google Chrome seems to be moving faster because it is adding new features. Firefox doesn't because most of those features have already been in Firefox for years and a lot of recent additions in Firefox are only relevant to developers or are to include new web standards.
In the end it all comes down to personal choice. My favourite at the moment is Google Chrome, but I can see myself going back to Firefox if the interface improves in the way the developers are claiming it will.