just another one of those "why?" questions. on my server 2003 firefox comes up instantly when you click the shortcut. here on linux it takes 20-30 seconds. i hear my hard drive rattling intensely for that period of time. is the windows binary easier to load into the memory or something? i mean certain games are faster in linux than windows... like doom 3 and quake 4. overall surfing is not blazing fast. apt-get speeds are mind blowing, very very fast. download speeds on firefox suck. regular mozilla is not a hot-rod either. epiphany is another browser... but there i have to pray for anything to ever come up in general.
dont get me wrong, this is not a slow system - Athlon XP 2600, 768MB RAM, 240GB HD, have 1200MB swap space. this should be more than sufficient (i have a P200, 64MB as my server, apt-get speeds on there are pretty much just as fast). odd huh?
oh yeah... explorer is faster than nautilus. once again... why?
is there a linux version of winrar? Ark and File Roller are a bit slow too. extraction is fast on Ark but it takes forever to compress something (and compression rate isnt great) while winrar does it so much better... and more options too. im sure there are other custom written command line archiver programs for linux... but its just a matter of convenience. ill try winrar on wine sometime. hopefully it wont destroy my filesystem.
winamp under wine comes out faster than xmms and Amarok. what the hell?

It's not the binary, it's actually the differences in the way the os functions. Linux does not preload anything, it only loads what is currently in use.
Firefox [ and Mozilla's Seamonkey ] both use XUL for the ui, which means that when you start them in linux, the included java interpreter has to be started first.

With windows, the activex interpreter can start creating the UI while XULRunner loads.

20 - 30 secs seems a bit extreme though - takes around 5 secs here, on an old athlon 1200

of threads in windows....

It takes exactly 4 seconds on my machine. What distro and WM are you using?

Disable IPv6