General :: Web Browsers Running Much Slower, Compared With Windows 7, Same PC?

Debian lenny, old install (I've upgraded to lenny when it was just about to become the stable release), versus windows 7, fresh install.Comparing browsers speeds with numion.com/Stopwatch.html, I had results such as:Iceweasel (firefox) on linux: from 9.154 seconds to 21:860 seconds (the same webpage, reloaded)Firefox on windows: 4.32 seconds - and never much slower than thatThe fastest browser on linux was Opera, ranging from 8.562 to 5.503 secs to load the same page, but even internet explorer beat/match it with its timing of about five seconds.

I have not other browsers on windows; on linux there is aroraonqueror (KDE3), kazehakase, chrome, and dillo, besides text browsers. I didn't test on dillo; Kazehakase and chrome were the only ones which had nearly decent results, but still very bad, 11 to 13 seconds for chrome, and 21 for kazehakase. Konqueror just seemed to never finish to load the page, I gave up when it was still loading somethingfter nutes and 5 seconds.'ve emptied the cache every time I would test, and I was running almost only the browsers and not much else. Whatever comes by default on windows, and on linux, I was on openbox, with nothing much going on I guess, I think the most memory consuming processthe time, besides xorg and the browsers themselves, was dictd.

I've researched a little bit about, but not enough to make a list of possible things to change in order to improve the speed on linux. Most of the time there are people just agreeing that on windows the rendering is faster, and other people saying that with them is the opposite, with some minor variations like people saying that linux is faster for plain downloads while windows is faster for web browsing due to better graphics.

(by the way; I haven't installed any graphic card driver on windows, which is still running on 1024x768, while linux runs on 1280x1024, with the "nv" generic driver, without fancy options, not supported by my old card) The closest to a suggestion of possible solutions was someone saying tha compilation may affect performance, I guess it was both about kernel compilation, and the web browsers themselves.I'll google a bit more about how to "compile for speed", both kernels and programs (maybe the x server