Just an interesting post I made to OSNews in response to someone saying that IE “starts quickly” while Firefox “takes forever.”
Just to clear up, the only reason IE starts faster in Windows is because IE is technically “always running.” The only thing that has to “start” is creating a Window with an “IE control” in it.
I get the same behavior on Linux by running galeon -s when my X session starts. This runs galeon in “server mode,” which means it’s always in memory, and when I run Galeon (on my laptop, I press ALT+F1 to run my browser), it starts in < a half-second. If Firefox had a similar mode, it could offer you the same thing. As for OpenOffice.org, it's true that the start time is relatively slow. I'm sure they'll get around to optimizing it. Personally, I think the obsession people have with start times on Linux and Windows machines is due to a basic design flaw with most Window managers. Applications should really only start up once; if you start an application multiple times in a day, you're essentially performing redundant computation. The program can sit in memory and if it really is not used in awhile, it will get paged out anyway due to our modern Virtual Memory implementations. In OS X, for example, you can get the same effect as "galeon -s" or IE's "preloading" simply by not quitting an application after all its windows are closed. This leaves the application running, and when you open a new window it will be nearly instantaneous. (Strangely enough, many old Windows/Linux freaks are sometimes "annoyed" by this aspect of OS X, since in the Linux/Windows world up to now, closing all windows of an application is equivalent to closing the application itself).