Just a heads up: Wine is not an emulator, so software running under Wine is infact "native" software. There is no reason why it should be slow, so saying "Wine beats Linux Firefox" should not necessarily imply that Linux Firefox is particularly sluggish.
But it shows that windows firefox is still much faster than linux firefox.
I'm very grateful for this article because this has been a pet peeve of mine for years, too. I sometimes run a win32 firefox inside a vmware window side-by-side to the native linux fox - even the vmware fox wins hands down, talk about humiliation.
The situation has improved a lot with Firefox 3 and the latest Minefields but it's still a night and day difference to windows or OSX. While the UI performance has become nearly bearable (at least it doesn't freeze rock solid for multiple seconds anymore) the javascript performance is still ridiculous. Usability tanks with only a few addons loaded and Firebug has become nearly useless to me recently because it has grown a habit to halt on any pages containing non-trivial javascript with the dreaded "A script on this page made me pee, Abort or Freeze?"-dialog.
Opera is proof that it doesn't have to be that way. It's zippy on every platform, including linux. Just compare the two on anything involving alpha-transparency, e.g. http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox2/.
Well, perhaps this article will finally draw some attention to the problem. Linux shouldn't to be treated like a third-class citizen on the single most important app. After all many (if not most) developers, the people who actually build the visible portion of our internet, are doing it on linux.
