Firefox slow on Microsoft Windows?

Go here, if you are looking for methods to speed up firefoxThe Dutch HCC has a quite section online with columns, of wich the latest was [“Bekeerd tot Firefox”](http://www4.hccnet.nl/404/index.cfm?fuseaction=achtergronden.

ColumnsPage&id=770&otherid=577) wich means “converted to Firefox”.

The author is in geneal not very impressed with Firefox. Why? He thinks firefox loads slower than IE and does not really load pages faster than IE.

He might think so, but I would like to see some figures. Can he back up his statement with benchmarks? Any references? Did he try loading huge pages? Did he try opening IE and firefox next to one-another and see which one loads quickest?Because I beleive the the opposite, and I can back it up better. Not with benchmarks, because I do not own a windows PC myself.

I tried loading some big (huge) html pages side by side in firefox and IE. firefox was notably faster. And about the startuptime? I think this depends a lot on the situation.

Of course IE is quicker in loading, IE is tightly woven into Windows, so a big part of IE is already loaded. Unfair competition, but Joe User will not care about unfair competition, so it is reasonable to state that often opening IE is the fastest.

BUT: if you have very low resources (memory, old PC) Firefox is much, much faster (I tried this). And also the tabbed browsing speeds up things: If you open a new window or page in IE you need to open a new instance of IE, this is faster than loading the browser from scratch, but still, it takes some time to open a new window. In firefox, on the contrary, you will not have to open a new window: opening tabs is notably faster than opening a new window in IE.

So all in all, for Joe User the speed might not make a difference, but for Joe user on a slow interent connection, or Joe User on a n old PC it does make a lot of difference: for them Firefox is faster.