As you probably know, all of us here at Port80 are seriously into Web speed. But, since we don't make our own Web browser, we don't talk much about which browser is fastest. And, super-fast servers, compression, proxy servers, and the like are all kind of irrelevant if the Web browser at the end of the line is a dog!
So, we took a keen interest when we came across How To Create's browser speed comparisons:
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html
Unfortunately, the results are more complicated than you might like...it turns out which browser is fastest depends heavily on which OS you're on, and what sites you're visiting (they do a nice job of testing different tasks on different systems). Overall Opera looks pretty strong, especially on Windows, and they do offer the slightly troubling observation that Internet Explorer appears to be slowing down!