Are you testing apples to apples? For example, loading from a hard disk instead of online so that random variances in network speed don't affect you?

Yes, it is slower both when the page is brand new, and when the page has already been loaded once. It appears to be the rendering that is slow, not the downloading.

Do you have one app or the other set to download more than two HTTP streams at the same time? That might affect download/render speed. Earlier in this thread somewhere, I think we discuss how to set that feature in Firefox, you need to make a registry change to set that feature in IE.

Already done on both. This is also a tweak I have used with IE for a long time, and is one of the first things I did with Firefox (the RFCs be damned.)

Finally, are you confusing Firefox's rendering style with slowness?

Yes, there is that. After some further testing I admit this makes it look worse than it is, but it is still slower. I was testing on http://scragz.com/tech/mozilla/test-rendering-time.php , which records load times using some javascript, The first time loading it, I got 11 seconds with Firefox vs 6 with IE, subsequent loading averaged 9 seconds for Firefox and still 6 for IE. Not as bad as my original "2 to 3 times" estimate, but still noticably slower.

More troubling is the fact that during my further testing I had problems with pages loading again. Going on to Fark (for instance) and clicking on 6 or 7 links really fast in MYIE2 is fine. Doing the same in Firefox guarantees that some of the pages will not load. And hitting the reload button does not work in this instance either, I have to close the window and reclick on the link to get it working. Maybe I can fix this behaviour, time to wade through their forums again.

And another thing, I just went to Google and hit the News link...and nothing happened. Actually, none of them did, not groups, or images, or any of the rest of the links. Reloading the page, hitting it multiple times, nothing helped. Searching works, but not those links. I had to close the browser and reload it for it to work again.

So obviously there are some issues, but I am willing to cut them some slack since it really is still pretty new. And as I said, it is still not as bad as getting spyware on my computer.